InfoQ Homepage Stories & Case Studies Content on InfoQ
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BEA Publishes SOA Practitioner's Guide
BEA has self-published a set of guides that are designed to help develop a reference architecture for SOA and a guide to services lifecycle. These guides also contain input from BEA customers on successful SOA adoption.
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Practitioners Adapt Agile to Local Constraints
Some people think they can only be Agile with small, co-located teams and full management support, but most teams aren't that lucky. So, should they should give up on Agile techniques? Scott Ambler's answer is a resounding "No!" His Dr. Dobbs article "Imperfectly Agile: You Too Can Be Agile!" outlines how Agilists overcome common challenges that others use as excuses for not being Agile.
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An Interview with Hal Fulton, Author of "The Ruby Way"
Pat Eyler interviews Hal Fulton, Ruby veteran and author of "The Ruby Way".
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Opinion: Code Coverage Stats Misleading
John Casey recently spent some time refactoring Maven's assembly plugin, using coverage reporting to mark his progress and make sure he didn't break anything as he went. It didn't exactly go as planned - but at very least it was a learning experience. His conclusion: when you're seeking confidence through testing, perhaps the worst thing you can do is to look at a test coverage report.
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Book Excerpt: Agile Retrospectives
InfoQ brings you an exclusive chapter excerpt from the recent book "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great", by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. These expert facilitators show how teams can run focused, helpful retrospectives themselves, without an outside facilitator. We asked the authors a few questions about the making of their book.
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Tech Stories Need to Include People and Technology
Brian Marick, reflecting on conversations heard at Agile2006, blogged about his concern that some of us are telling stories from the purely human or social viewpoint, while other are telling technology-only stories, noting that that XP isn't a story you can tell well without talking about both of these. Marick encourages us to include both when we communicate in and about projects.
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IBM Buys Insurance Focused Webify
Big Blue snaps up Insurance focused SOA vendor Webify. Both IBM and Webify were at the center of a significant SOA outsourcing project with Fireman's Fund Insurance. Terms were not disclosed.
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Microsoft Counting On Scrum and XP
When Microsoft launched SQL Server 2005 last fall, ending a five-year wait for major revisions, Steve Ballmer acknowledged "It's been a bit long in the making, we're committed to a much closer cycle time."eWeek reports that they will do this using agile development methodologies, such as XP and Scrum. Yet they won't mandate methodology, stressing product quality instead to encourage improvement
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Agile2006 Day One Podcasts
The Agile2006 Conference got a kick-start from industry veteran Peter Coffee, who challenged a standing-room crowd to reject the idea that broken software is normal, and to "shun mediocre attainments" . Bob Payne has been recording interviews and sessions at the conference, including the entire keynote.
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Agile Delivery at British Telecom
Methods and Tools has a 3-part article by Ian Evans of British Telecom outlining the challenges of software development at BT and the approach they took to switch to an Agile approach. Going from a well-established waterfall-based delivery approach to Agile takes patience and time, as well as a lot of commitment. But despite the challenges, few at BT would go back to their old ways.
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InfoQ Article: Top 8 SOA Adoption Pitfalls
Thomas Erl is the world's top-selling SOA author. He has written two books on SOA. In this InfoQ article, Thomas explains the pitfalls others have fallen victim to inorder to help you chart a safer route down your own SOA roadmap. To this end he has collected the eight most common SOA adoption pitfalls.
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InfoQ Book Review: Collaboration Explained
David Spann introduces Jean Tabaka's book: "Collaboration Explained" in which she shares stories and facilitation techniques to make groups more effective, and provides templates to get them started.
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Google's Lean Software Process
On the Manageability.org blog, Carlos E. Perez asked "how closely do Google's development practices match Lean software development?" and compared their process against the seven Lean Software practices: Eliminate Waste, Amplify Learning, Empower the Team, Deliver as Fast as Possible, See the Whole, Build Integrity In, Decide as Late as Possible.
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Outsourcing Gone Bad - Another Reason to Consider Agile
Proponents of Agile methods suggest they can spare organizations some outsourcing nightmares, by helping in-house teams produce ROI comparable to outsourced solutions. Stories from Sprint and Sears provide incentive to at least give them a hearing.
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InfoQ Article: Application Failover using AOP
In this latest InfoQ article, Debasish Gosh writes about how AOP was used on a large financial project to transparently implement error handling logic over the Oracle 10g RAC database and IBM MQSeries, to enable transparent failover.