InfoQ Homepage Teamwork Content on InfoQ
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Leadership is not Obsolete for Self-Organizing Teams!
In this talk, software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about "the matrix problem", alignment, waste cutting, planning, standards and other topics including the role of measurement: "cash flow thinking" over "balance sheet thinking". InfoQ presents video of this popular talk from the Agile2007 conference.
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Ready! Set! Getting New Team Members off to a Good Start.
How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning is integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.
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How Long Should Retrospectives Last?
The original definition of a retrospective, as presented by Norm Kerth, was a 3 day, offsite meeting. In, Agile Retrospectives, we are given 5 phases to be covered, but no specific guidance on time. In her recent article, Rachel Davies suggests that we have 30 minutes per week under review. How long should a retrospective last to be effective?
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InfoQ Presentation: Jean Tabaka on Surviving Meeting Burnout
Teams moving to an Agile approach may feel irritated as they move from command-and-control to a collaborative culture - which can start to look like non-stop meetings, starting first thing every Monday morning. In this InfoQ exclusive presentation, recorded at Agile2007, Agile coach Jean Tabaka shared her experiences working with teams, offering guidance on how to alleviate meeting burnout.
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Microsoft announces MSDN Tester Center
Today Microsoft launched a new site on MSDN focused on the testing community and tester professionals at large. The site is meant to promote testing within the greater Microsoft developer ecosystem.
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Presentation: Implementing Scrum In A Distributed Software Development Organization
At Agile2007 we heard the tale of a distributed Scrum project with 50 people in 4 continents. BMC Identity Management decided to build their next generation product, including architectural changes and component integration, using Scrum to handle the uncertainty of their product's requirements. This presentation talks about how.
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Peter Hosey of Adium on Code Reviews
There is no question that formal code reviews catch bugs and can delay the inevitable "big ball of mud" that all successful projects seem to turn into. However, arranging a meeting for every check-in quickly becomes untenable on all but the most critical of projects. Peter Hosey talks about his experiences and how he conducts code reviews in Adium.
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Ted Neward's thoughts on Architecture Roles & Responsibilites
Ted Neward shares his thoughts on the roles and responsibilities of the Software Architect, discussing what an architect does, how to approach the role, and if architects are still relevant.
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InfoQ Article: Lean Kanban Boards for Agile Tracking
"Big Visible Charts" aren't unique to Agile - Lean manufacturing also has its Kanban Boards. "Kanban" roughly means "card or sign," and each Kanban card is "pulled" onto the board only when the work represented by an "in progress" card is retired. In this InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe proposes using Kanban Boards to track Agile project status (Time, Task, and Team) to enhance collaboration.
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The Role Of Leadership - Agile 2007
Mary Poppendieck spoke at Agile 2007 providing an insight into the adaptation of manufacturing management principles in the software development arena.
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Failure to Learn Stifles Productivity
Amr Elssamadisy and Deborah Hartmann have written an article asking us to consider that there may be one common attribute to all software development projects that, if focused upon and improved, can make productivity soar.
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Using SSIS in a Team Setting
Jamie Tomson talks about his experiences trying to use SQL Server Integration Services in a team environment.
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Does Hosted Team Foundation Server Make Sense?
Hosted infrastructure often makes sense for companies, especially small ones with modest needs. For less than $20/month, one can get an ASP.NET or Apache co-hosting complete with a MySQL or SQL Server database. But does it make sense for other services like source control?
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InfoQ Interview: Experiences with Planning Poker
In this fourteen-minute interview, Nils Haugen described "Planning Poker," a simple mechanism for arriving at estimates collaboratively, which has additional team building benefits and improves team estimates over time. Haugen shared his views on why this technique is an important tool for Agile teams in this InfoQ interview.
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Agile Team Size
Using Agile methods with large teams is a reality - the old Agile = Small Team equation is no longer valid. Nonetheless, team size is still an issue. How important is team size and what, if anything, should we do about it?