InfoQ Homepage News
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Stanford Study Shows: Maxi-Multitaskers' Performance Impaired
A Stanford University study confirms that multitasking is definitely counterproductive: maxi-multitaskers fared worst in several standard tests. Agile implementors take note: there's good reason to urge each team to work on one product, with one product owner - splitting time across many tasks is a less effective way to work.
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Silverlight 4 and IIS Media Services 3 Promise Superior Content Delivery
Microsoft has announced the upcoming release of a new generation of IIS Media Services, v. 3.0, and it is going to hold an early preview of Silverlight 4 features during International Broadcasting Conference 2009 (IBC) on September 11-15th. Main features are: interactive, high-definition streaming of video content, native multicast and offline DRM support.
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Enterprise 2.0, a New Buzzword
A new post by Andrew McAfee describes the advantages of Enterprise 2.0 and gives examples of how Enterprise 2.0 approaches can help to solve real life problems.
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Lucid Imagination Releases Performance Monitoring Utility for Apache Lucene
Developers working with Apache Search engine Lucene typically rely on using a code profiler, debugging the source code, or manually instrumenting the Lucene code to track down performance variations with their Lucene implementation. LucidGaze, a free product from Lucid Imagination, offers an alternative. InfoQ takes a look at the product and talks to Lucid Imagination to find out more.
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Deleting Data Is Not a Recommended Practice
Oren Eini, alias Ayende Rahien, encourages developers to avoid database soft deletes leaving the reader with the impression that hard deletes are an option. Reacting to Ayende’s blog post, Udi Dahan strongly advices to completely avoid data deletion.
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Building Scalable Web Services
Tom Killalea, Vice President of technology with responsibility for infrastructure and distributed systems engineering at Amazon.com wrote an article on ACM queue on building scalable web services. He outlines guiding principles to building scalable web services with a lot of real-world examples, the core theme of which is “build only what you need”.
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Key Elements of a Successful Agile Retrospective: Preparation and Participation
Agile retrospective helps the team examine what went well during the past sprint and identify the areas of improvement for the future sprints. However, sometimes the exercise of conducting a retrospective ends up as a futile effort due to lack of preparation. Moreover, key members of the team end up either not attending or not participating in the meeting.
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Ruby on Rails Security Vulnerabilities
There has been a buzz around the Ruby on Rails community lately with discovered security vulnerabilities and subsequent updates every Rails developer should be made aware.
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Comparing Microsoft and Apple Websites’ Usability
In the article entitled Apple vs. Microsoft – A Website Usability Study, Dmitry Fadeyev, co-founder of Pixelshell, compares Apple’s and Microsoft’s web sites from a usability perspective, and Apple is the winner. Scott Barnes, PM at Microsoft, agrees with him and suggests the problem is because various site sub-domains have different management.
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.NETZ – Compression and Packing for .NET Libraries
From the beginning, the .NET runtime had a decent packaging system based on a collection of assemblies. While far better than loose script files or collections of class files, it is not as convenient as statically linked executables or executable JARs. Vasian Cepa’s .NETZ gives developers the ability to compress .NET assemblies and pack them into a single executable file.
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PMI Launches Agile Community of Practice at Agile2009
The Project Management Institute (PMI) officially launched their Agile Community of Practice at the Agile2009 conference. The group's stated mission is: "To equip PMI Members with Agile skills and knowledge" Mike Griffiths has been credited with getting things moving when he issued a challenge at Agile 2007 that PMI form an Agile Specific Interest Group.
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Tasktop Supports Integration with ScrumWorks Pro and ThoughtWorks Adaptive ALM Tools
Tasktop Technologies, the company behind Eclipse Mylyn Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) integration framework, now supports integration with Danube Technologies Scrumworks Pro and ThoughtWorks Studios Adaptive ALM software. Tasktop also released Tasktop Pro 1.5 version back in June.
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Role of Code Generation in Java Application Development
With the recent release of code generation tools such as Spring Roo from SpringSource, Skyway Builder Community Edition version 6.3 and BluAge's M2Spring, there is a renewed focus on the role of code generation in developing enterprise Java applications. InfoQ spoke with project leads from Spring Roo and Skyway products about how the code generation fits in the java application development.
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StoryTeller and Executable Specifications - Interview with Jeremy D. Miller
Last week Jeremy D. Miller announced a preview release of his StoryTeller project: an open source .NET project for “Executable Specifications”. InfoQ sat down with Jeremy and asked him about what StoryTeller is, how it differs from other tools like Fit/FitNesse and Cucumber, and what the future looks like for the project.
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Top Ten Tips for An Agile Coach
Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, co-authors of the book Agile Coaching, gave a fun session “Top Ten Tips for Agile Coaches”. The session could well have been called “Top Ten Things that Many Agile Coaches get Wrong”.