BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage XP Content on InfoQ

  • Presentation: Agile and Beyond - The Power of Aspirational Teams

    In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Tim Mackinnon talks about the aspirations behind the Agile principles and practices, the desire to become efficient, to write quality code which does not end up being thrown away. Tim has a personal perspective on Agile practices and shares from his own experience.

  • Presentation: 10 Ways to Screw Up with Scrum and XP

    In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Henrik Kniberg talks about 10 possible reasons to fail while doing Scrum and XP. Maybe the team does not have a definition of what Done means to them, or they don't know what their velocity is, or they don't hold retrospectives.

  • InfoQ Book Review: Agile Adoption Patterns

    Ryan Cooper picked up Agile Adoption Patterns: A Roadmap to Organizational Success by InfoQ's own Amr Elssamadisy and gives this book a positive: This book belongs on the bookshelf on anyone who is interested in helping a traditional software organization make an effective transition to a more agile way of working.

  • How to Evaluate a Good Fit for XP?

    XP might not be for everyone. An interesting discussion on the Extreme Programming group, tries to find the factors, on which, an individual should be evaluated, to determine, whether he is fit to be on an XP team.

  • TDD Opinion: Quality Is a Function of Thought and Reflection, Not Bug Prevention

    In a recent post, Michael Feathers argues against the widely held idea that unit testing, by itself, improves code quality. Michael talks about unit testing, integration tests, TDD and Clean Room Software Development, concluding that code quality is a function of thought and reflection, not bug prevention.

  • Interview: Rachel Davies on Generic Agile

    In this interview taken during Agile 2007, Rachel Davies, director of Agile Alliance, talks about Generic Agile, about the necessity to understand what is the essence of a development process.

  • Interview with Joseph Pelrine: Agile Works. But HOW?

    Joseph Pelrine has come full circle: from university studies in Psychology, journeying through SmallTalk, XP and Scrum, and now back to broader questions: Why and how does Agile work? In this interview, Joseph talked about Complexity Science, and how story-telling, "sense-making," network analysis and speed-dating's gut-feel approach may prove more useful than our old toolkits for managing teams.

  • TDD: Essential Skill or Architectural Landmine?

    At JAOO '07 Bob Martin asserted: "it is irresponsible for a developer to ship a line of code he has not executed in a unit test." In this InfoQ video, Martin debated with another well respected software thought leader, Jim Coplien, on this and other topics, including Design by Contract vs. TDD and how much up-front architecture is needed to keep a system consistent with the business domain model.

  • Continuous Integration And Version Control for Databases

    After asserting that one must, as a rule, always version their database work, Scott Allen detailed an approach to making the best of versioning databases. Allen presented a comprehensive, practical approach to creating a baseline, using change scripts to manage schematic revisions, controlling programmatic database objects, and handling branching and merging.

  • TDD/BDD Leading To Incomplete Unit Tests?

    Peter Ritchie raised concern about TDD and BDD keeping practitioners from writing good unit tests. He cites an over-reliance on “interaction testing", a core mantra and essence of TDD and BDD, as a driver with tendency to result in incomplete unit testing.

  • Kent Beck on Implementation Patterns

    What does good code look like? In this interview, Kent Beck talks about his new book, Implementation Patterns, that deals with this question. Kent explains why Compose Method is so important, but also talks about the relationship between implementation patterns and XP, the history of software patterns and why he believes that Cockburn's Shu-Ha-Ri description of learning is naïve and simplistic.

  • Is Velocity Really the Golden Measurement?

    What value do teams get from measuring velocity, beyond the ability to reasonably estimate commitments for the short-term future? J.B. Rainsberger proposes that teams spend less energy scrutinizing velocity and more energy thoughtfully identifying and eliminating areas of waste in their projects.

  • Religion driven industry? Buzzwords and checklists vs. thinking and inspection

    James O. Coplien has recently argued that today’s industry is based on buzzwords and checklists. The use of some techniques and methodologies, TDD for instance, has become “a religious issue”. This prevents from inspecting possible tradeoffs and focusing on finding solutions that would be the most appropriate and the most cost-effective for a given project.

  • 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.

  • Agile Measurement - A Missing Practice?

    Tom Gilb and Lindsey Brodie have written an article that suggests that Agile methods have a major weakness - that of lack of quantification. They argue that all qualities can be expressed quantitatively and present a new process, PLanguage, which looks very much like Scrum with an explicit measurement step. Are they right? Are Agile methods such as Scrum and XP in need of explicit measurement?

BT