InfoQ Homepage Collaboration Content on InfoQ
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Tasktop 2.0 Supports Task Federation and Cross-Repository Agile Planning
The latest version of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) collaboration tool Tasktop supports task federation, cross-repository Agile planning, and new connectors to other ALM tools like HP Agile Accelerator and SmartBear CodeCollaborator. Tasktop team last week released version 2.0 of the software which also has integration with Hudson CI tool.
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NEC introduces a new Software Architecture for Unified Communications and Collaboration
NEC corporation has recently demonstrated its Unified Communications & Collaboration Platform software architecture (UC&C) for Rich Internet Applications and IT Architectures at the Enterprise Connect 2011 exhibition. The virtualized platform utilizes Rich Internet Applications to provide a collaboration solution for companies and their customers.
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How Facebook Ships Code
Facebook is probably the hottest company today, driving a very high level of interest and scrutiny. Despite a high level of secrecy, Yee Lee, a product manager at Skype, has assembled a large collection of notes detailing how code ships at Facebook.
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Swarming: What's the Point?
Agile teams are encouraged to focus all their effort, as much as possible, on one story at a time--a practice known as "swarming." But why do this? What are the benefits you can expect to see by swarming each story?
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Agile/Scrum Retrospectives–Tips and Tricks
Retrospectives and feedback loops are at the heart of any successful Agile/Scrum implementation. They’re the tool we use to help teams improve. Yet in two day introduction to Agile classes they often get glossed over. Lacking time trainers (including this one) often race through the topic outlining only one simple type of retrospectives.
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Is the Agile Retrospective Prime Directive Patronizing?
Angela Harms recently blogged about the Agile Retrospective Prime Directive. She discusses how the language of the prime directive around "everyone doing their best" could be seen as patronizing and insulting to team members. Other commentators who have discussed the intent of the Prime Directive include Esther Derby and George Dinwiddie. How useful is the Retrospective Prime Directive?
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Sociology and Scrum
The Scrum Master job requires skills in diplomacy-- and effective communication. Team members must also communicate effectively. Tools for accomplishing these "soft-skill" tasks are now freely available. A detailed book about one of these useful tools entitled SOFTWARE FOR YOUR HEAD, is over 400 pages in total, and is now available-- free to the world in PDF format.
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Sprint Burndowns - Are We Measuring the Wrong Things?
Does a the traditional Sprint Burndown chart help the team? A number of Scrum teams find that tracking task hours hides the true state of the sprint and prefer other tools.
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Re-estimate Completed User Stories for a More Accurate Velocity?
In a recent thread on the Scrum Development mailing list, Paul Battison asked whether his team should re-estimate completed stories after the sprint is done, so as to have the team's velocity reflect the actual effort that went into completing the stories.
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Collabnet Offers new Agile ALM Cloud options
Collabnet has released a new version of Teamforge (5.4), the general release of Subversion Edge, and a new Teamforge licensing agreement (TeamForge SCM Licensing option). All were announced at the Agile 2010 conference this week. The stated intent of these new products is to increase the flexibility of organizations seeking to adopt Agile software development methods.
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How Should a Product Owner Participate in a Planning Poker Session?
During planning poker, a product owner should explain the user stories to the development team, but he or she should not try to unduly influence the development team's estimates.
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Designing Agile Spaces
Agile has always stressed the need for an appropriate physical space to support the team and team practices. Ryan Martens recently wrote about the intersection of design, design thinking, and the agile environment - suggesting that open space and wall-to-wall whiteboards are just the beginning of what is needed to create an ideal agile team-space.
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Cost of Cross Functional Teams
Cross functional teams are the teams in which all members work on delivery of the same business value. It could potentially be the same feature or the same product. Though, Agile recommends cross functional teams due to a lot of inherent advantages, there are some caveats that organizations need to be aware of.
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The Value of Diversity
This is the second in a series of discussions looking at factors that enable Agile teams to be successful. Diversity of gender, culture, opinion, perspective, skills and background is considered to be an important factor in forming and persisting high-performance teams. This news item examines the perspectives from variety of commentators.
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Learning from the creative industries - consistency to build trust
This is the first in a series of discussions looking at factors that enable teams to be successful. This post reports on a recent Wired magazine article that looks at the creative process in use at Pixar Animation Studios and how their process encourages team formation, long-term relationships and trust in a “safe to fail” environment.