InfoQ Homepage Project Management Content on InfoQ
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Consistently Not Done, Done, Done at the End of Sprints?
Do you consistently have stories that don't meet your "definition of done" at the end of your sprints? Is the team tieing the hands of the product owner?
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The "Command and Control" Military Gets Agile
Agility is a term that is gaining traction in some very unusual places. The military is suddenly taking Agility very seriously. The military defines Agility as "the ability to successfully respond to change". The term "command and control" is used so commonly in the military that is abbreviated to "C2" in common usage. There is also a C2 Journal, which has had many articles on Agility recently.
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WPF vs. Silverlight: Choosing the Right Technology for a Project
There is some confusion about when to use WPF and when to use Silverlight. Choosing the right technology for a project depends on precise requirements the application has and the differences between WPF and Silverlight’s capabilities.
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What Should an Agile Project Charter Contain?
Agile projects have a strong emphasis on people over process and verbal rather than paper communication. Many formalised methodologies require heavyweight project initiation documents that have to be completed in order to gain funding. Given this potential conflict, what should an Agile project charter contain – how much documentation is “just enough”?
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Twist 2.0 Supports Behavior Driven and Collaborative Testing
ThoughtWorks Studios recently released the latest version and second major revision of Twist, its Agile test automation product. Twist 2.0 helps testers, developers and business analysts with collaborative testing. It also supports writing tests scripts using Groovy dynamic language.
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Repetitive Tasks an Agile Smell?
Is slicing stories in horizontal tasks an Agile Smell? Is this common habit used in Scrum/Agile Planning meetings - hurting a team's focus on customer value? What is being suggested instead?
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Scrum Gathering: Community of Practice
The Agile community is developing consensus around three important areas of practice: requirements gathering, agile coaching, and open space formats for group learning. At the recent Scrum Gathering, these topics were prominent topics of discussion on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 of the event. InfoQ explored each of these further to gain a better understanding of their place in Agile.
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Is the Agile Community Being Unreasonable?
A recent thread on the pmi-agile Yahoo! group discusses some frustrations of the Agile recommendations that seem on the verge of naivete.
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What is Story Point? Are they Necessary?
Michael de la Maza asks the question what exactly is a Story Point? He went looking for an answer and found many: “Story points represent nebulous units of time.” or “Story point is a random measure used by Scrum teams. This is used to measure the effort required to implement a story.”
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Experiment Driven Development - The Post-Agile Way
TDD and BDD are now widely-used software development techniques. However, solely following TDD & BDD may still lead to missed business opportunities, or worse, a negative impact to the business. Two questions which TDD & BDD are unable to answer are: How do you measure the usage of your application? How do you get feedback from your customers? Is Experiment-Driven Development (EDD) the answer?
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Lean + Real Options = Reduced Complexity and Risk
Real Options, a decision-making process based on Financial Option mathematics, was mentioned by Kent Beck in his 1999 "white book," Extreme Progamming Explained. More recently, Agilists have been exploring how Real Options intersects with Agile. Now Chris Matts and Olav Maassen specifically address the Lean Software community, proposing that application of Real Options improves Lean Development.
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What Are the Trends in Technology Today?
ThoughtWorks has released the Technology Radar 2010 this month, a white paper containing ThoughtWorks' technology strategy and trends in four major domains: Techniques, Tools, Languages, and Platforms. InfoQ looked at this whitepaper in depth to better understand the ideas and suggestions being offered by ThoughtWorks.
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Adaptive Reuse - Lessons from civil engineering
Software engineers frequently take issue with the sequential development processes that are believed to be at the core of civil engineering – in answer to the “why can’t you build software like they build bridges” criticism sometimes levered at software development. The reality is that civil engineering projects frequently apply approaches that Agilists will recognise.
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Estimating Business Value
The traditional agile approach to prioritization is that user stories of higher business value should be implemented before ones of lower business value. The concept is simple, but implementing it well relies on having a mechanism to assess business value. Pascal Van Cauwenberghe has recently described an approach to defining business value, called "Business Value Modeling", which may help.
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Forrester Releases Free Research Report on Lean for Business
Forrester Research, in preparation for their Business Technology Forum next week, has released an analyst report for free download, entitled "Lean: The New Business Technology Imperative." Aimed at management, it discusses Lean as a whole-business imperative, and its impact on IT, cautioning: "Don’t get so caught up in eliminating waste that you forget to create value and increase flexibility."