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  • TDD/BDD Leading To Incomplete Unit Tests?

    Peter Ritchie raised concern about TDD and BDD keeping practitioners from writing good unit tests. He cites an over-reliance on “interaction testing", a core mantra and essence of TDD and BDD, as a driver with tendency to result in incomplete unit testing.

  • InfoQ Presentation: Selecting the Right Methodology and Steering it to Success

    It's easy to agree with "anything more than 'barely sufficient' in is waste," but it's more complicated when we actually need to customize a process for a particular project. At Agile2006 Todd Little shared a model to help leaders choose the right flavour of Agile based on project and team attributes, and he emphasised the need to actively steer projects as development progresses.

  • Unconsciously Agile? (Rhythms of Agile Development)

    Damon Poole wrote recently that many of us maybe practicing Agile development without even realizing it. It turns out that many of us maybe showing signs of the Agile disease without knowing it.

  • Are You An Agile Architect?

    Vikas Hazrati recently posted an article on Agile Journal, defining his ideal characteristics of an Architect working in an Agile team, reflecting how the role of Architect has changed in light of Agile practices.

  • InfoQ Interview: Dave Thomas on the Joys of Life-long Learning

    Guest interviewer Jim Coplien chatted with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas at QconLondon 2007, covering everything from 'agile' publishing and academia to staying limber with code katas. Dave's career advice: Cultivate the passion of a 5-year old!

  • Agile Kanban: Visual Tracking Beyond the Team Room

    In the beginning Agile was largely a developer-driven initiative, sometimes improving development processes only to find the real bottlenecks lay outside developer control. In his latest InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe analyses Lean manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking tool, how it differs from the Agile taskboard, and how it helps identify more far-reaching improvements.

  • Is VSTS Meeting its Design Goals?

    The goal of VSTS is to provide a tool that is not prescriptive and highly customizable for managing the software development process. Kevin Jones provides a soup to nuts framework for utilizing VSTS to support a development team and build better applications.

  • InfoQ Interview: Hugh Ivory on DSDM's Public "Atern" Release

    DSDM has been called "the grandmother" of the agile methodologies, first released in 1995. Until recently it was only available to members but this year, for the first time, the DSDM Consortium made the "Atern" release available to the public. Director Hugh Ivory provided an overview at Agile2007, including a look at both old and new customer-facing roles in DSDM.

  • 'MSF for Agile' with MS VSTS - Worth a Look?

    At Qcon London, Kevin Jones spoke from his experiences about Building Better Apps using MSF for Agile with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). Using examples from Agile teams, he walked through the layers and components of Microsoft's tools, emphasising their flexibility. For Agile teams considering / already committed to Microsoft, this video provides an experienced viewpoint & may be worth a look.

  • Tight Coupling and its Unintended Consequences

    As we transition from component architectures to service oriented architectures, the balance between natural, efficient asset reuse and independent, decoupled systems is a real battleground. Neal Ford recently posted some thoughts about high coupling and it's unintended consequences, and we revisit a great InfoQ interview with Jim Webber about tight coupling as it applies to service architectures.

  • Presentations of the BeJUG SOA Conference available on parleys.com

    The videos of three talks at the Belgian Java User Group (BeJUG) Enterprise SOA'07 Conference have been published on parleys.com.

  • InfoQ Interview: Jeff Sutherland on "Who's Doing Scrum"

    There are over 10,000 Scrum Masters trained, that's a lot of Scrum! Well: Scrum, variants of Scrum, and Scrum-like processes. Are these distinctions important? Jeff Sutherland told us why he thinks it's important to understand a team's level of adoption - not to label it but to continue improvement. He cited the example of organically growing a Scrum team practice-by-practice at Google AdWords.

  • Evaluating a Service-Oriented Architecture

    The Software Engineering Institute has published a new paper "Evaluating a Service-Oriented Architecture".

  • QCon Panel: Modifiability - Or is there any design in Agility?

    Many people assume that agile methods mean an absence of design. Design still happens in agile projects, but it shifts from an up-front phase to a continual evolution. Design decisions should be left to the last responsible moment, but some design decisions do need to be made upfront. Martin Fowler explored this topic through a panel discussion at the last QCon.

  • Religion driven industry? Buzzwords and checklists vs. thinking and inspection

    James O. Coplien has recently argued that today’s industry is based on buzzwords and checklists. The use of some techniques and methodologies, TDD for instance, has become “a religious issue”. This prevents from inspecting possible tradeoffs and focusing on finding solutions that would be the most appropriate and the most cost-effective for a given project.

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