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Remote Customer, Remote Developers and a Project in Crisis
Though collocation is one of the prime recommendations of Agile, more and more projects are executed in a manner in which the teams are distributed. Safari Asad started an interesting discussion on the Scrum Development group to discuss about a project in crisis, which not only had a remote customer but also had remote developers.
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Naresh Jain Discusses "Simple Design & Testing" And The Conference Dedicated To It
"Simplicity" is a core agile tenet, particularly when it comes to software design and testing. Since 2006, Naresh Jain has been running a worldwide conference, the Simple Design & Testing Conference, for practitioners to collectively push the boundaries on the topic. Naresh tells InfoQ what's going on behind this small, but well-known conference and why he is so passionate about the topic.
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Agile Teams as Cohesive Communities
Agile projects are (should be?) highly collaborative team environments built on a foundation of trust and open, honest communication. Such collaborative environments don’t just happen, and they can be easily disrupted. There are many commentators who provide advice on how to establish and maintain collaborative teams. This article summarizes the advice from a few of them.
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Handling Team Changes
Change is constant, yet people fear change. It is mostly the fear of unknown and loss of comfort zones that makes the perception of a change painful. Though Agile teams are well prepared for change, however most of them are not comfortable when the change affects the team.
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The "Command and Control" Military Gets Agile
Agility is a term that is gaining traction in some very unusual places. The military is suddenly taking Agility very seriously. The military defines Agility as "the ability to successfully respond to change". The term "command and control" is used so commonly in the military that is abbreviated to "C2" in common usage. There is also a C2 Journal, which has had many articles on Agility recently.
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New Features in Google Wave Robots API
The Google Wave Robots API v2 is not backward compatible with version 1 and has been enhanced with new features like: Active API, Context, Filtering, Error Reporting, Proxying-For. Beside a Java and a Python client library useful to create robots, developers can build their own libraries based on the Robot Wire Protocol.
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Agile Testing Challenge
Gerald Ford International Airport has a parking lot fee calculator and Matt Heusser noticed that it was buggy. So he issued a challenge to testers around the world: Find the bugs in ParcCalc. The respondents included James Bach, Selena Delesie and many others.
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Soft Skills Are Paramount: A Report From Agile Boston Openspace
Last week the Agile Boston user group held a full day OpenSpace conference. One session was focused on how to affect other groups in an organization that you and/or your team is dependent on. The members of this session shared their different contexts and problems and came up with several strategies in improving their situations, none of which were were Agile practices.
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Touch and Intimacy in Agile Teams
If the consolidation and integration of elementary Agile practice is ending, that means something new is starting. Does a new phase of innovation lie just ahead? Where is the edge of the new Agile frontier? InfoQ looked at the research of Michael de la Maza, an agile coach and trainer who is researching controversial topics such as intimacy in teams and organizations, to learn more.
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Organizing Self-organizing Teams
Rashina Hoda is a PhD researcher who has been examining how self-organization actually happens on teams. She has studied teams in New Zealand and India and identified six distinct roles that emerge when teams effectively self-organize. She spoke to InfoQ about her research, which will be published at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2010) to be held in Cape Town in May.
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Scrum Gathering: Community of Practice
The Agile community is developing consensus around three important areas of practice: requirements gathering, agile coaching, and open space formats for group learning. At the recent Scrum Gathering, these topics were prominent topics of discussion on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 of the event. InfoQ explored each of these further to gain a better understanding of their place in Agile.
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ThoughtWorks’ Developers Favor Distributed Version Control Systems
Martin Fowler has conducted a survey on ThoughtWorks’ software development mailing list to determine how some of the version control systems (VCS) are perceived by developers. He also wrote a review of most prominent VCSes comparing centralized and distributed systems.
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Most Effective Team Structure
Agile talks about small team sizes with the magic numbers of 7 plus minus 2. Agile also recommends whole teams. Whole team is a concept that advises for having sufficient skills within the team itself to get the job done. Thus the development team has the testing skills, database skills, user interface skills, apart from the core development skills. Is defining the team structure this easy?
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US Scrum Gathering, An All-Open Space Final Day
The 2010 US Scrum Gathering in Orlando wraps up after an all-Open Space Day 3, exemplifying the collaborative and empirical essence of Scrum as its originally intended.
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US Scrum Gathering, An Exciting Day Two
Day two of the 2010 Scrum Gathering, packed full of a whirlwind of topics, talkers, activities, useful nuggets, and again (of course) healthy debates. Highlights including Harrison Owens, the creator of Open Space (as we know it), Jeff Patton's User Story Mapping, Jurgen Appello on self-organization and much, much more.