InfoQ Homepage Project Management Content on InfoQ
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Sprint Planning: Story Points Versus Hours
There is a constant, long drawn debate on the benefits of using either story points or hours for sprint planning. Mike Cohn is big on breaking User Stories down into tasks, which are then estimated in hours. Jeff Sutherland on the other hand suggested that some of the best teams that he has worked with burn down story points.
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PMI Launches Agile Community of Practice at Agile2009
The Project Management Institute (PMI) officially launched their Agile Community of Practice at the Agile2009 conference. The group's stated mission is: "To equip PMI Members with Agile skills and knowledge" Mike Griffiths has been credited with getting things moving when he issued a challenge at Agile 2007 that PMI form an Agile Specific Interest Group.
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Tasktop Supports Integration with ScrumWorks Pro and ThoughtWorks Adaptive ALM Tools
Tasktop Technologies, the company behind Eclipse Mylyn Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) integration framework, now supports integration with Danube Technologies Scrumworks Pro and ThoughtWorks Studios Adaptive ALM software. Tasktop also released Tasktop Pro 1.5 version back in June.
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DeMarco Reflects on 40 Years of Software Engineering Evolution
40 years after the NATO Conference on Software Engineering, Tom DeMarco paused to reflect on the discipline's evolution, wondering whether the metrics orientation he championed has distracted from the real point of computing: "transformation, creating software that changes the world." Is his earlier advice valid, though? "No", he said, in Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?
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'State of Agile' Survey Open
The fourth annual 'State of Agile' survey is open for public participation. The 6-page survey takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete and participants remain anonymous. Over the past 3 years the survey, sponsored by VersionOne, has gauged how widely agile practices have been adopted, as well as the results obtained.
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Using the RFP Process to Hire Agile
In large organizations and projects, it's not unusual for an Agile team to find itself shackled to a non-Agile partner/vendor/supplier. Friction ensues, energy is wasted. While the solution might appear to be: "hire better teams", Scott Ambler goes to the root of the problem, providing a strategy for creating better RFPs: ones that attract Agile teams.
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Presentation: Three Years of Real-World Ruby
Martin Fowler talks about ThoughtWorks's experience with using Ruby on client projects for the past three years, and the creation of a Ruby-based product 'Mingle'.
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The PMI Agile Community of Practice
Agile and the Project Management Institute (PMI). For many years and for many people this combination of terms rings a similar connotation as "oil and water"; they don't mix. But, is this justified? Jesse Fewell, Dan Mezick, and others say no and are aiming to bring agile into the PMI with the new 'PMI Agile Community of Practice'.
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IBM Rational and InfoQ eBook: Scaling Agile with C/ALM
IBM Rational and InfoQ preent an eBook, Scaling Agile with C/ALM, "dedicated to all of the functional and dysfunctional organizations that are eager to break down the organizational and cultural silos, and become a finely tuned software delivery machine." The eBook explores the barriers to team integration and scaling and then shows, in detail, how to overcome these obstacles.
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Presentation: Democratic Political Technology Revolution
The state of the art in political technology evolved radically 2004-2008. In 2004, software development in Democratic political campaigns consisted of a few rag-tag hackers taking shots in the dark and building applications. In 2008, political start-ups built innovative social applications that raised nearly 1/2 billion dollars, and elected a President.
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Presentation: Meeting the Challenge of Simplicity
This session addresses the abstract notion of simplicity, looks at why it is critical in modern UI design and answers questions: Why does simplicity matter? Is there a meaningful definition of simplicity? Why do design processes and good intentions undermine simplicity? What processes and techniques can software developers use to achieve simplicity?
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Interview: Jeff Patton on Embracing Uncertainty
In this interview with Jeff Patton at Agile 2008, he talks about three strategies that can help product owners do their job more effectively by embracing the inherent uncertainty in all software development. Namely they are understanding the ultimate goals of the project, delaying decisions until the last responsible moment, and scaling up by building quality.
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Article: Using SketchFlow to Create Better Prototypes
Simon Guest of Microsoft introduces SketchFlow by discussing why prototyping is an important developer skill and how a tool can enhance developer-customer interaction. The functionality and features of SketchFlow are presented in the context of an ongoing sample application (an on-line store).
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What’s Planned for Visual Studio Team System 2010
Bill Maurer, Developer Technology Specialist at Microsoft, held a conference presenting what new features Visual Studio Team System 2010 (VSTS) will have in the following key domains: Team Foundation Server, Source Control, Project Management, Testing, Development and Architecture.
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Story Mapping Gives Context to User Stories
The Scrum notion of 'backlog' is a single, prioritized list of user stories for the team to implement. This works well for organizing what the team should work on in the near term, e.g. during sprint planning. At the Orlando Scrum Gathering, Jeff Patton described story mapping. This is a way of organizing stories that provides richer context and can help with release planning.