Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
QCon San Francisco
Nov 19-21:
+ 80 sessions & tracks
Register now
and Save $400!
IBM WebSphere
Virtualize apps
to lower costs,
Increase agility
Learn more!
Terracotta:
Scale your
Apps w/ease
Offload the DB:
Learn More!
At QconLondon 2007 Jim Coplien spoke with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas for InfoQ. This energetic 30-minute interview runs the gamut of Dave's wide-ranging interests: 'agile' publishing; how to turn what you love doing into a book; programming (and methodology) monocultures; staying limber with code "katas"; and advice for academics: help your students live with the passion of a 5-year old!
There is no better way to learn a technology than being able to watch someone teach it to you. A new video podcast has been created to help .NET developers learn about various aspects of .NET development in short, focused segments.
Andy Hunt's interview last month talks about his progression from pragmatic programmer to Agile development to his latest interest – Pragmatic Wetware. "Wetware is the stuff in your head. That's the thing between your ears that's really where all the action is – that's where all the software development actually takes place."
The program for Agile 2008, Expanding Agile Horizons has just been announced. This year the program was This year it features a number of stages (i.e. tracks) from which attendees can sample: Main Stage, Research, Breaking Acts, Questioning Agile, Customers and Business Value, User Experience, Developer Jam, Tools for Agility,...
Microsoft has recently made available the .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit.
How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning 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.
Agile conferences are receiving an influx of novice teams and managers, and some suggest that new conferences should be organized for these beginners. To the contrary, this report from XPday Montreal suggests that mixing up expertise levels creates a valuable experience for all.
"Ruby is risky" is a common perception. As Ruby on Rails moves closer to the mainstream, that risk will decrease. In this article, Bruce Tate examines the changing risk profiles for Java and Ruby from a managers perspective, examining Java's initial adoption and also common risk myths about Rails.
Venkat Subramaniam, international trainer and co-author with Dave Thomas of "Practices of an Agile Developer", talks about his passion for improving project success by incrementally implementing an Agile approach, specifically addressing large projects and projects in trouble.
Scrum, arguably the fastest-growing Agile methodology, is well described in the original Scrum books, which tend to be read once and put aside. The SPRiNT-iT coaches have abstracted the basics to produce a compact reference to help teams facilitate all Scrum meetings and create the Scrum artifacts. The book doesn't teach Scrum, but offers trained teams confidence to run their first successful Sprints - successes that will increase the acceptance of Scrum in their organization.
