InfoQ Homepage News
-
Burn Stories Not Tasks
Developers commonly break user stories into tasks to facilitate distributing the implementation work across the team, and allow tracking of progress at a finer level of granularity. Unfortunately, a story can explode into a list of non-trivial tasks so large that the story is not deliverable by the end of the iteration. Ron Jeffries suggests: "Do stories as a unit, not broken into tasks."
-
Panel: BayAPLN Agile Expert Panel
During QCon San Francisco 2008, InfoQ and BayAPLN, a local group of Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), organized a panel comprised of Agile experts which answered questions from the audience. The panelists were: David Chilcott, Moderator, Polyanna Pixton, David Hussman, Sue Mckinney, Pat Reed.
-
Moore's Law Is Too Slow
Advances in "cloud computing", clustering, and general-purpose computing with commodity GPUs suggest compute power per dollar may increase significantly faster than Moore's Law predicts.
-
Eventually Consistent, Revisited
Building reliable distributed systems at a worldwide scale demands trade-offs between consistency and availability. Last month, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels posted an article describing approaches to tolerate eventual data consistency in large-scale distributed systems.
-
Programming Languages: 2008 Review and Prospects for 2009
In the beginning of last year, Ehud Lamm launched on Lamba the Ultimate a thread about programming languages predictions for 2008. Several subjects popped up: concurrency, functional programming, future of Java, Ruby, C++, and many others… What really happened in 2008 and what are the prospects for 2009? Bloggers have addressed these questions on demand of James Iry, echoing at last year thread.
-
QCon London 2 Months Away; Special Discounts by Jan 15th
InfoQ's 3rd QCon London (March 11-13) is a couple of months away and will again feature 15 tracks, 100 speakers, and excellent learning and networking opportunities. The last chance to save £295 expires next week January 15th!
-
Handling Your Team's "Rotten Apple"
Recently there has been an active discussion in the Scrum Development Yahoo Group about handling an "under-performing" team member. In the 130+ response thread, "Rotten apple in Scrum team", talk ranged from advice for the primary question, to talk of team morale and who manages it, to the classic debate of measuring individuals, to distinguishing whether a team is really a "team", and more.
-
Silverlight 2 Source Code and Toolkit Are Available
Microsoft has published the source code and unit tests for the managed Silverlight 2 controls included in System.Windows.dll, System.Windows.Controls.dll, and System.Windows.Controls.Data.dll. Also, the Silverlight Toolkit was made available on CodePlex.
-
Windows 7 Beta Is Available
In a keynote address at Consumer Electronics Show 2009 (CES), Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, announced Windows 7 Beta and a new version of Windows Live. Windows 7 Beta is available for download for MSDN, TechBeta and TechNet customers and will be widely available starting January 9th.
-
Debate: Is SOA Dead?
Burton Group's Anne Thomas Manes wrote an obituary for SOA, saying SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. InfoQ has collected industry reactions.
-
Doing Agile After Layoffs
Part of a development team has been laid off, the team is down to four developers with a part time Scrum Master and no dedicated Product Owner. Is Scrum still applicable? What options are there? How does one adapt?
-
Article: Making TDD Stick: Problems and Solutions for Adopters
In this article, Mark Levison addresses the difficulties encountered by developers willing to adopt TDD, the reasons why many start using TDD but give up after a short period of time, and what could be done to help developers make TDD a habit.
-
Requester Pays: A New Amazon Business Model
Amazon has introduced a new business model for its S3 web services called Requester Pays. Businesses using S3 can mark up data buckets so their transfer will be paid by data requesters instead of being paid by their owners as it is now. Used in conjunction with DevPay, the new model opens new business opportunities for companies willing to share their data with others.
-
Web Beans (JSR-299): Q&A with Specification Lead Gavin King
An ambitious and key part of Java EE 6, the Web Beans specification spans JSF/EJB integration, context management, dependency injection and AOP. The specification is currently in public review and the review period has been extended into 2009. An Alpha build is also available. InfoQ talks to Gavin King to find out more about the state of play of the specification and progress to date.
-
Data Integration Software XAware 5.2 Supports Data-First Design and Data Services Design Wizard
The latest version of XAware, an open source data integration software, offers data-first design feature. XAware development team recently announced the general availability of XAware 5.2 version.