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  • Agile Architecture Interactions

    James Madison shows how architects can bring agile and architecture practices together to pragmatically balance business and architectural priorities while delivering both with agility.

  • The Art of Creating Whole Teams: how agile has changed the way we work with our customers

    Angela Martin earned her PhD examining how agile methods work in practice and what is different about this way of working. She shares some of the key practices which organisations can implement to increase their likelihood of successful cultural change through creating Whole Teams - truly cross functional collaborative teams working well together to deliver products which meet customer's needs

  • Breaking Down Walls, Building Bridges, and Takin’ Out the Trash

    Agile Team Rooms can help double the productivity of an Agile Team. Most people are familiar with the Caves and Commons approach where the team has a common area on the inside of the room and private desks on the outside. Some teams dispense with the private spaces in the room, but few go as far as Menlo dispensing with the rooms altogether.

  • Use of Kanban in the Operations Team at Spotify

    In this article, InfoQ spoke with Mattias Jansson, Operations Engineer at Spotify (an online music streaming service) about the adoption of Kanban by the Spotify Operations team. Jansson offered a lot of detail about the choice to adopt Kanban as well as the experiences that the Operations team at Spotify has gained while implementing a Kanban-based approach to dealing with their workload.

  • Working with the Product Backlog

    Roman Pichler discusses the product backlog along with techniques for effectively grooming it. Complicated applications of the product backlog are covered as well as how to handle nonfunctional requirements and how to scale a product backlog for large projects. This is a chapter excerpt from Roman's book: Agile Product Management with Scrum.

  • Skills for Scrum Agile Teams

    The skills required to be hyper-productive in agile projects are different from those required by a traditional one. This article identifies behavioral and technical skills required for a team to have that edge. Anyone who acquires these "delta" traits should be equipped with the right set of behavioral and technical skills, which enable them to work effectively in an agile project.

  • Fred Brooks on The Design of Design: Interview and Excerpt

    A review of Frederick P. Brooks' latest book, The Design of Design. Few individuals have had as much influence on the 'practice' of software development and this book of loosely coupled essays on the essence of design, design process, and the development and nurturing of great designers extends and enhances previous contributions to the field. The review is enhanced with an interview and excerpt.

  • Agile Teamwork: The Leadership - Self-management Dilemma

    Self-managed teams are unstable and are successful when the ‘Leadership – Self-Management’ dilemma is understood and dealt with. Too much central control destroys agility, inhibits creativity and resists change. Too much self-management leads to chaos and anarchy and destroys a team. A successful Agile Team operates as far along self-management as it can, without tipping over into chaos.

  • Burndown Analysis for Managing Productivity & Schedules

    Managing the productivity and the schedules on a project is always a big challenge due to the complexities involved in taking the decisions fast. We attempt to use the “Burndown” information to address this issue. We show how a burndown chart comes in handy when a Project team is faced with the tough questions on the issues pertaining to Schedule, Resource Management and Productivity.

  • Virtual Panel: The evolution of bug trackers

    Bug (issue) tracking systems have become a standard tool for any organization that develops software and have evolved greatly in the last years. InfoQ has conducted a virtual panel with people from JIRA, FogBugz, Basecamp and MantisBT about this evolution and the future developments in this field.

  • Collaborative Leadership and Collaborative Management

    What is the role of a leader in today’s dynamic environments? Does traditional management provide value in a market that requires agility and adaptability? In this article, we propose a leadership and management framework that fits well with the current need for innovation and distributed decision-making.

  • Book Review: Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision Making

    One of the responsibilities of self-organizing teams is to take decisions that respect everyone’s opinion. This book has some great examples in coaching the team to navigate through difficult discussions so they can maintain their speed without endangering their success by suspending or ignoring critical issues.

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