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  • Holacracy - The Self-Organizing Enterprise

    The fit between Agile teams and traditional enterprises can be challenging. Agile may highlight or exacerbate pre-existent dysfunctions, in areas a project manager may not be well-placed to address, so those involved in Agile roll-outs are thinking about alternate ways to organize the enterprise. Holacracy, created at Ternary Software, suggests that self-organization can extend outside IT.

  • Opinion: Agile Forgets the Human Factor

    Kevin Brady, self-declared Agile critic, has a problem with Agile software development approaches: he feels that while they look great on paper. they fail to work in reality because they forget the human factor. Commenters on his blog entry question whether Agile or poor implementation lie at fault.

  • InfoQ Interview: Jim Johnson, Creator of the CHAOS Chronicles

    InfoQ editor Deborah Hartmann interviewed the creator of the CHAOS Chronicles, Standish Group founder and chairman Jim Johnson. The Standish Group's statistics on project failure are widely quoted, as they have been since the first survey results came out in 1994. Jim spoke with Deborah about his research, and the role of Agile in changing the IT industry.

  • Starfish Brings Google-Style Distributed Processing to Ruby

    An implementation of MapReduce, a process invented by Google to easily split up tasks to be performed by hundreds of machines, is brought to Ruby in a library called Starfish.

  • Five Habits of Highly Effective Software Developers

    What are some of the code-level practices of highly effective developers? Robert Miller wrote a detailed article on Java.NET covering 5 practices which could apply to any language, including minimalist constructors, methods with clear focus and intent, minimizing logic in mutating methods, and minimizing dependendies between behaviour methods.

  • Opinion: Inability to Adopt Agile May Signal Bigger Problems

    Peter Coffee, IT industry veteran, blogged on the recent Digital Focus survey of the state of Agile practice, noting that obstacles to Agile adoption are also general danger signs of development dysfunction.

  • Survey: The State of Agile in Practice

    In March Scott Ambler surveyed over 4,200 people to discover the actual rate of Agile process adoption and effectiveness. His conclusion: Agile is not only growing in popularity, it's working so well that adopting an Agile approach appears to be an incredibly low-risk choice. Ambler recently published not only his conclusions but also the raw data he collected.

  • Naked Agile and Naked Skydiving

    Prompted by recent discussions on the ScrumDevelopment list, Alistair Cockburn and Jeff Patton sound a call to focus on the basics: "Listening, Designing, Coding, Testing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something."

  • Agile, Orthodoxy and a Message From God

    A long and complex thread on the ScrumDevelopment list, set off by the phrase "Agile 2.0," has been exploring the past and future of Agile methodologies (for good or ill) including so-called "next generations" approaches like AUP, MSF Agile, and AMDD. Ron Jeffries, Ken Schwaber and Scott Ambler are just a few of the serious agilists who participated in this lively conversation.

  • Hanselminutes Podcast on Scrum Project Management

    Scott Hanselman, a Certified Scrum Master at Corillian, has posted a podcast on the Scrum project management methodology. He uses Scrum in his own projects and feels that Scrum makes Agile approachable and easy to grasp. He goes over just-in-time task-level estimation, velocity, how burndown charts help forecast delivery dates, and the concept of when a feature can be considered really "done".

  • Is there room for both Ruby on Rails and J2EE?

    Aaron Rustad takes a look at the differences between Rails and J2EE in an article published by IBM developerWorks, and ultimately suggests J2EE won't be dying any time soon.

  • SOA Integration and Methodologies

    Miko Matsumura interviews John Harby, an independent consultant, OASIS Techican Committee member and SOA practitioner on popular SOA implementation methodologies.

  • Refactoring your Rails application to be RESTful

    Scott Raymond writes about how his life became easier when he refactored the application behind IconBuffet.com to using RESTful URLs.

  • Online Discussion on Scrum Requirements Basics

    The ScrumDevelopment list has seen lively discussion lately on Requirements issues frequently faced by new teams: "Can the ScrumMaster be the Product Owner too?", "How do we prioritize our Product Backlog?" and "QA's role in a SCRUM process". New teams quickly discover that a poor-quality Product Backlog can frustrate and undermine a team that is otherwise raring to start delivering value.

  • Patterns for Daily Stand-up Meetings Published

    Jason Yip has published "It's not just standing up", Patterns for Daily Standups on Martin Fowler's Bliki. In the article he discusses the benefits and consequences of common practices for daily stand-ups. The patterns are intended to help direct the experimentation and adjustment of new practitioners as well as provide points of reflection to experienced practitioners.

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