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Better Best Practices

Organizations often introduce Best Practices as part of a change program or quality initiative. These can take a number of forms, from cheat sheets to full-blown consultant-led methodologies, complete with the requisite auditing and accreditation. In this article, Dan North shows how best practices can not only fail to help, but even have a severe negative impact on your top performers.

Dan North
on Mar 11, 2008
Architecture & Design

Architecture as Language: A story

Architecture is often described non-tangible in Word documents or entirely technology-driven. Both are bad, but what can be done? Markus Völter describes how to evolve a language around your architecture, a formal language that as a side effect ends up being a good base for generating important parts of the system.

Markus Voelter
on Feb 27, 2008
NetBeans: Ruby Developer's New Best Friend (Part 3)

In the third and final article of the Netbeans Ruby series, Roman Strobl, covers quick fixes, RSpec support, and additional plugins of use to Ruby developers.

Roman Strobl
on Feb 17, 2008
Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean

In this InfoQ article Kenji Hiranabe applies lessons learned while working with Japanese manufacturers. While many Agile teams are optimizing only a portion of the value stream, Hiranabe proposes a simple way to adapt lessons from Lean Manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking system to make process visible to more of the organization, for better communication and process improvement.

Kenji Hiranabe
on Jan 14, 2008
NetBeans: Ruby Developer's New Best Friend (Part 2)

This is the second article in an ongoing series detailing the new Ruby support of the Netbeans 6.0 IDE. This installment takes a look at editing features such as code templates, GEM support, and unit testing.

Roman Strobl
on Dec 13, 2007
Offer People Reasons to Love Your Remote Meetings

With an increasingly global workforce, face-to-face meetings are becoming rarer these days. In their place, we more frequently conduct business with a very different experience using a teleconference line supported by desktop sharing tools. Tips and tricks effectively facilitating these interactions, an emerging and important skill, are covered in this article.

Pete Johnson
on Dec 10, 2007
NetBeans: Ruby Developer's New Best Friend

Sun has put a large investment into Ruby in the last year with JRuby and the addition of Ruby language support to their Netbeans IDE. InfoQ will be featuring a series of articles by Netbeans Evangelist Roman Strobl exploring the new Ruby features of Netbeans. The first article takes a look at code completion, debugging, and refactoring support.

Roman Strobl
on Oct 17, 2007
TDD with Selenium and Castle

Dan Bunea shows developers how TDD can be applied in .NET using Selenium RC and Castle. Test first principals provide architects a way to quickly jump into active development early in the application development lifecycle. The benefits of TDD are a drastic reduction in defects as well as increased flexibility in the code base since the application evolves quickly through an iterative process.

Dan Bunea
on Feb 20, 2007
Spring.NET - QnA

InfoQ had a chance to sit down with Aleksandar Seovic and Mark Pollack the co-creaters of Spring.NET. Spring.NET is an application framework that brings AOP, a Dependency Injection container and data access framework to .NET. It is not a complete port of Spring to .NET yet it preserves the tenets of Spring.

Aleksandar Seovic Mark Pollack
on Nov 07, 2006
Agile Business Rules

James Taylor looks at the challenge that arises when the new requirements are not really requirements at all, but new or changed business rules. Aren't business rules the same as requirements? Taylor says: no, not really; and looks at how to make an agile development processes work just as well for business rules as they do for other kinds of requirements.

James Taylor
on Sep 04, 2006
Book Review: Collaboration Explained: Facilitation skills for software project leaders

David Spann, himself an experienced facilitator, provides an insightful review of "Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders" by Jean Tabaka. Jean, an experienced teacher, consultant and coach, offers techniques to enhance group effectiveness, provides some templates to assure their first efforts are well planned, and tells some great stories along the way.

David Spann
on Jul 10, 2006
Dealing with Legacy Code

Here's a three-pronged attack to use on the legacy code that everyone eventually inherits: Build, Automate, Test. Use this BAT to create a safety net to ensure your code continues to work the way you want it to. Richardson shows how this helps quickly identify and eliminate unintended side effects. See how your day-to-day work compares, and see if you need to approach your work differently.

Jared Richardson
on Jun 12, 2006