InfoQ Homepage Stories & Case Studies Content on InfoQ
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Stories of Scrum Adoption in China
This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, looked at five very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results. He asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.
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Can Architects Stop Financial Ruin and Market Meltdowns?
The purported fraud by Jerome Kerviel at Société Générale may bring down a major financial institution and may have caused markets to tumble worldwide. Attention has turned to systems intended to prevent fraud and other illegal activities. What role can software architects play in detecting and avoiding fraud and other suspicious behavior?
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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!
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Successful Collaboration Doesn't Happen by Accident
Partnership Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can find themselves playing a "consultant" role, and should consider using consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not regarding the exchange of money, but to create a climate for stellar results for the client, while also communicating their own values and preferences.
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Book Excerpt and Review: Release It!
Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael Nygard discusses what it takes to make production-ready software, and explains how this differs from feature-complete software. InfoQ spoke with Michael Nygard and asked him several questions related to the book and some of the issues it raises.
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Panel on Agile Leadership: Stories from the Trenches
InfoQ presents video of a panel from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, where four business leaders spoke about their experiences: Bud Phillips (Capital One Financial), Israel Ganot (BMC Software), Steven Ambrose (DTE Energy), Peter George (Cronos Inc.). Topics included top-down vs. bottom-up adoption, making the leap of faith to enterprise adoption and the value of the PMO.
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An Agile PM Walks a Mile in a Customer's Shoes
Last year Ternary COO Alexia Bowers walked a mile in a project customer's shoes, and told us how it felt in this Agile2006 Leadership Summit presentation. She stressed the need to meet deadlines through creative solutions, instead of simply cutting scope.
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Ruby and the hype cycle
A recent blog post on a failed Rails project caused a big debate about the viability of Ruby on Rails. A closer look at the post paints a different picture, though. We take a look at the reactions in the Ruby community, and compare this discussion with the upheaval about Twitter earlier this year.
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Lessons Learned: Transitioning to Agile at GMAC-RFC
This half hour presentation looks at a Fortune 500 company's effort to achieve faster time to market by transitioning from RUP to Agile. Hussman & Stenstad reveal the gradual process from readiness assessment and chartering through education and practice to the creation of an adaptive culture with a "living plan", sharing lessons learned along the way.
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Mainsoft: Running .NET on the JVM While Maintaining Performance
Mainsoft recently released version 2.0 of Mainsoft for Java EE (formerly known as Visual Mainwin), and also released a whitepaper which showed that a .Net-based application which was cross-compiled to run on Java EE using Mainsoft for Java EE performed as well as or better than the original .NET-based application did in several areas. InfoQ spoke with Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen to learn more.
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InfoQ Interview: Rich Kilmer on the Power of Ruby
Rich Kilmer is one of the Ruby world's great conversationalists and storytellers. In this InfoQ exclusive interview, Rich tells us about using Ruby at DARPA, the research arm of the USA's military, plus how he has leveraged a variety of cutting-edge software and techniques such as Flash, DSLs, OWL and semantic web technologies in conjunction with Ruby.
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Adobe Photoshop C3 Team Succeeds with Agile
"Better quality, plenty of features, fewer nights and weekends: what's not to like?" wrote Mary Branscombe in an interview with CS3 co-architect Russell Williams. Adobe has successfully adopted an iterative development process, leaving waterfall behind. This time they benefitted from a champion, who had successfully adopted iterative processes elsewhere, helping them over the rough spots.
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Agile Planning Reduces Stress for Business and Developers
In The Freedom of Limited Capacity, Agile coach Mishkin Berteig wrote about what happened when he used Agile planning practices on his own business. By making his long work queue visible, he now had a better way to grapple with reality. Paradoxically, he also experienced a reduction in his stress level - in spite of his very visible backlog! The same effect has been observed on Agile teams.
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Pragmatic SOA: Adoption Project by Project
According to the latest release from Zapthink, success with SOA rarely necessitates comprehensive change; instead, architects who choose their SOA battles carefully can deliver on SOA's promises to the business via projects of limited scope. Architects who miss this point often set the bar for SOA success too high.
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Case Study: Developing a Custom Agile Practice Adoption Strategy
Teams can get sidetracked by process when implementing Agile: they spin, trying to figure out which practices to start with, unsure which will have the biggest impact, or how they fit together. In their InfoQ case study, Amr Elssamadisy and John Mufarrige develop a customized adoption approach to help a team decide where to focus first - an alternative to adoption of pre-packaged methodologies.