InfoQ Homepage Software Craftsmanship Content on InfoQ

Articles

RSS Feed

Newer Older

Book Review: Agile Adoption Patterns, A Roadmap to Organizational Success

Ryan Cooper reviewed Amr Elssamadisy's new book and found it a useful framework for designing customized adoption strategies. Rather than a single recipe of Agile practices for everyone, the reader is offered patterns and tools to help determine which practices will most effectively help them reach their own organization's specific goals.

Ryan Cooper
on Jul 21, 2008
An Introduction to Lean Thinking for Software

For Agile developers only familiar with Scrum or XP, it may be unclear how Lean relates to what they do. This article introduces Lean Thinking and how it enhances software development. Ning Lu of ThoughtWorks China identified the biggest obstacle to Lean or Agile as the mind-set developed during the period of large-scale manufacturing.

Jacky Li
on Jun 23, 2008
Using Numbers to Communicate - in the Spirit of Agile

It's an old story. Techies cave in to the business guys because they don't know how to push back. The problem? Developers use numbers primarily for computation, but the business uses numbers to make decisions. In this story the "Spirit of Agile" encourages a developer to turn non-computational problems and issues into number language.

Linda Rising Barbara Chauvin
on Jun 13, 2008
Creating Product Owner Success

The role of the Scrum Product Owner is powerful, but challenging to implement. Success can bring a new and healthy relationship between customers/product management and development, even competitive advantage, but it comes at a price: organizational change is often required. In this article Roman Pichler looks at what it takes to succeed as a Product Owner.

Roman Pichler
on May 14, 2008
The Three M's - The Lean Triad

The discussion of applying lean principles to software development has largely focused on identifying and eliminating waste (in Japanese: muda). Lean Thinking equally aims to remove overburden (muri) and unnecessary variation (mura). Roman Pichler discusses the relationship of the "three M's" and proposes to eliminate overburden as the first step toward a leaner process.

Roman Pichler
on Feb 27, 2008
Book Excerpt and Review: Release It!

'Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software' by Michael Nygard, which is nominated for a 2008 Jolt Award, discusses what it takes to make production-ready software and explains how this differs from feature-complete software. InfoQ spoke with Nygard about the areas that the book covers and some questions around how the book's philosophy fits in with concepts such as Agile.

Ryan Slobojan
on Dec 20, 2007
AgileEVM: Measuring Cost Efficiency Across the Product Lifecycle

In this InfoQ article, Tamara Suleiman explains AgileEVM, an adaptation of traditional Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics, designed to fit a Scrum project management framework. Compatible with traditional EVM metrics, it allows both Agile and traditional projects to be tracked within a single program, giving important early warnings of trends across the entire product life cycle.

Tamara Sulaiman
on Oct 05, 2007
The Secret Sauce of Highly Productive Software Development

When Agile teams get stuck in the just-average Norming stage, rather than continuting to the exciting, high Performing stage of teamwork, sometimes they're suffering from an invisible "learning bottleneck" that stunts team performance. Agile practices require us to take time to reflect and learn - and a team that learns quickly succeeds.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss Amr Elssamadisy
on Aug 14, 2007
Book Excerpt: Continuous Integration means Continuous Testing

Continuous Integration, a basic XP practice, has now become an accepted development best practice. InfoQ presents Chapter 6: Continuous Testing, with advice and examples for writing good tests to ensure system quality, from the book "Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk," which aims help teams make CI a transparent "non-event".

Andrew Glover Paul Duvall Steve Matyas
on Aug 05, 2007
Implementing Automated Governance for Coding Standards

Most development organizations of a significant size have some form of coding standards and best practices. Simply documenting these standards and keeping them up to date can be a significant challenge and enforcing them even harder. Our organization has found that enforcing coding standards and best practices in an automated fashion through our build process has been highly effective.

Mark Figley
on Jul 26, 2007
Agile, Architecture and the 5am Production Problem

Can refactoring and unit testing really create robust “working software” that survives the real world? In this story adapted from his book Release It! Michael Nygard contends that "abstractions leak": we need to attend to architecture, even in Agile projects, to guard ourselves against the 5AM failures that occur when foundational abstractions misbehave.

Michael Nygard
on Jun 25, 2007
Unit-Testing XML

There are many occasions where software creates XML output: XML documents are used for data interchange between different applications, web application create (X)HTML output or respond to AJAX requests with XML, and this has to be tested as much as anything else. In this article, Stefan Bodewig explains how to perform those tests with the XMLUnit framework he has co-authored.

Stefan Bodewig
on Jun 11, 2007

Newer Articles

Older Articles

InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter

Login with:

Don't have an InfoQ account?

Articles