InfoQ Homepage Methodologies Content on InfoQ
-
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.
-
InfoQ Interview: Per Kroll on EPF, an Open Source Process Initiative
The PM of the Eclipse Process Framework project explained in this presentation how IBM's Eclipse-based process tools allow teams to select the practices they want, to create a customised methodology that works for them. With a wiki and hooks to insert custom in-house documentation and practices, it provides a framework to configure the approach you want, or to grow into the approach you need.
-
Ruby x Agile: The shift from machine-performance to human-performance
This article is the second in the Ruby x Agile series, a set of six short videos exploring the relationship between Ruby and Agile methodologies, featuring Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto.
-
Failure to Learn Stifles Productivity
Amr Elssamadisy and Deborah Hartmann have written an article asking us to consider that there may be one common attribute to all software development projects that, if focused upon and improved, can make productivity soar.
-
Iteration Types
What is an iteration in the Agile world? How is it different than previous ways the software community has performed iterations? Are there different types of iterations, and does it matter? The ScrumDevelopment list has been recently discussing type A, B, and C sprints (sprint = iteration in Scrum terminology) as defined by Jeff Sutherland and the ideas are relevant the the wider Agile community.
-
Are Agile Development Practices Detrimental to Architecture and Design?
Is iterative and incremental development à la Agile practices - where one builds only what is required per iteration - detrimental to good design? Does Scrum encourage ignoring architectural issues? Can design and architecture evolve effectively without the technical Agile practices? Does test-first development lead to good design? Or does the red-green-refactor loop stall at local-minima?
-
InfoQ Presentation: DSDM and Lean Explained
This second Agile2006 Agile Styles video looks at DSDM and Lean. Jean Tabaka covered the history and principles of the venerable DSDM methodology, founded in 1994 and now accepted in the UK for use on government contracts. Mary Poppendieck gave real examples of how the 7 Lean principles provide competitive advantage, and discussed the relationship between quality, speedy delivery and low cost.
-
Agile Measurement - A Missing Practice?
Tom Gilb and Lindsey Brodie have written an article that suggests that Agile methods have a major weakness - that of lack of quantification. They argue that all qualities can be expressed quantitatively and present a new process, PLanguage, which looks very much like Scrum with an explicit measurement step. Are they right? Are Agile methods such as Scrum and XP in need of explicit measurement?
-
InfoQ Book: Scrum and XP from the Trenches
Henrik Kniberg last year published wildly popular paper 'Scrum and XP from the trenches' in which he chronicled in pictures and text how his 40 person development team implemented parts of Scrum/XP over a one year period. Henrik has updated his work and published a new version of it as a full book with InfoQ.com.
-
Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Agile compatibility
Design in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) world involves working with the user to understand the problem and come up with a user interface – typically on paper - of the entire system before turning it over, in Big Design Upfront (BDUF) manner, to the rest of the development team to build. So how can Robert Biddle claim that HCI has home-grown practices that are very similar to those of Agile?