InfoQ Homepage Project Management Content on InfoQ
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CruiseControl.NET 1.4.3 Released
A new version of CruiseControl.NET, the popular .NET continuous integration server, is now available. This release includes a new ccnet.config validator and numerous enhancements to the dashboard and CCTray application.
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Throw Away Your Bug Tracking System?
Elisabeth Hendrickson, A.K.A "testObsessed", presents a thought-provoking stance on triaging bugs in an agile project. She discusses her feelings that problems found during the iteration are not "bugs", that only the Product Owner has the right to call something "bug", and that a healthy agile team might likely have no need for a bug tracking system.
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Being A Better Product Owner
Anyone who has spent any time on an effectively executed agile project can attest to the fact that the Product Owner's (or, in XP, the "Customer's") collaboration with the development team plays a key role in the success of a team. Peter Stevens offers a bit of advice to help people in these roles do this well.
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SOA & The Tarpit of Irrelevancy
A new three-part post by Neil Ford discusses both the rationale behind SOA implementations and the role large vendors play in distracting them.
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Use Cases Considered Valuable (but Optional) For Lean/Agile Requirements Capture
Dean Leffingwell, author of Scaling Software Agility and Chief Product Methodologist at Rally, has concluded that Use Cases can be a valuable tool to model requirements for a large-scale Lean/Agile Project. Use cases are not commonly encountered in Lean/Agile (especially XP and Scrum), where stories are the requirements gathering tool of choice.
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Presentation: Agile Methods and User Centered Design
In this presentation filmed during ThoughtWorks’ Quarterly Technology Briefing, Dave Robertson and John Johnston explain what the Agile and User Centered Design’s (UCD) common denominators are, common values being the most important one in their opinion.
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Burn Stories Not Tasks
Developers commonly break user stories into tasks to facilitate distributing the implementation work across the team, and allow tracking of progress at a finer level of granularity. Unfortunately, a story can explode into a list of non-trivial tasks so large that the story is not deliverable by the end of the iteration. Ron Jeffries suggests: "Do stories as a unit, not broken into tasks."
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Addressing Nonfunctional Requirements in Scrum
Nonfunctional requirements describe qualities of a system (what it is) rather than its behaviors (what it does). Scott Ambler inspired much discussion when he recently asserted "Scrum's product backlog concept works well for simple functional requirements, but... it comes up short for nonfunctional requirements and architectural constraints." in an article on Dr. Dobb's Portal.
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Ruby SDK for the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform Released
The DotNetServicesRuby team, a partnership between Microsoft and Thoughtworks, announced the launch of Milestone 1 - Technology Preview of Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET Services, a key component in Azure, the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform.
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Presentation: Planning with a Large Distributed Team
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Wes Williams and Mike Stout share their recent experience with a large distributed team, the planning hurdles they encountered and how they passed them, and their recommendation: avoid large distributed teams.
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Presentation: Prioritizing Your Product Backlog
Choosing the right features can make the difference between the success and failure of a software product. Mike Cohn presented 'Prioritizing your Project Backlog' at Agile 2008 on how a project backlog should be organized and prioritized and non-financial techniques for prioritization such as kano analysis, theme screening/scoring, relative weighting and analytic hierarchy process.
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ThoughtWorks Announces Twist, Automated Functional Testing Platform
ThoughtWorks Studios has created Twist, an integrated development environment for functional testing of web and Java applications. The tool provides a single platform for documenting user stories, capturing executable requirements, developing, maintaining, running and reporting on functional tests. A free trial version of Twist is currently available for download and evaluation.
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Story-Focused Standups
A widely accepted agile practice is the daily standup meeting, in which each team member shares: what they have done since the previous standup, what they expect to achieve by the next, and anything that is getting in their way. Mike Cohn recently examined variations that shed additional light on the progress being made toward completing each user story.
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What is Sprint Zero? Why was it Introduced?
Some teams use a Sprint 0 to prepare their product backlog, the infrastructure (development environment, CI server), ... .Is this part of Scrum? Is it useful?
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Presentation: When Working Software Is Not Enough: A Story of Project Failure
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Mitch Lacey talks about a real life project that was on the verge of being successful, but was deemed as unsuccessful by the customer. Considering that "the true measure of project progress is working software", Mitch and his team delivered the software, but the client was not satisfied.