InfoQ Homepage Customers & Requirements Content on InfoQ
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No Bug Database?
James Shore, a recognized speaker and writer in the Agile space, has had a crazy idea: Get rid of your bug database. He's not advocating that teams ignore problems; but bug databases are often so packed with questions, feature requests, and defects that there's little hope of their all being resolved. Shore and some others in Extreme Programming circles think there's a better way.
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IT Hiring Trend: Business Savvy Mandatory
Ziff Davis' August surveys find that IT is growing in all sectors, leading to increased IT hiring. And though execs express a significant preference for IT professionals with a head for business over technical wizards, they anticipate these will be hard to find. Particularly in demand are professionals in project management, business-process redesign, business analysis and systems integration.
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The Creeping Featuritis Chart
Creeping Featuritis is an insidious sort of product rot, reducing useful software into heaps of expensive widgets and aggravating help features. Peter Abilla brings us a chart by Kathy Sierra, capturing what it looks like from the customer's point of view, and reminds us to "focus on the customer and abandon the competitor-focused strategy all-together."
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Naked Agile and Naked Skydiving
Prompted by recent discussions on the ScrumDevelopment list, Alistair Cockburn and Jeff Patton sound a call to focus on the basics: "Listening, Designing, Coding, Testing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something."
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SOA Helps Secure Your Retirement
Pension Benefit Guarany Corporation, a federal corporation insuring pensions of 44.1 million American workers has entered into a 6$ Million dollar contract to develop an SOA.
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Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two
Ron Jeffries is at it again. Always on the lookout for a great opportunity, he has made an unparalled online offer: send me your money and I'll send you (some kind of) software :-D
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Value-Driven Planning and Metrics
A stable Agile team can cost roughly the same each week, but value delivered changes over time. Agile planning takes into account the customer's view of value, allowing the team to deliver the most important business value right away, and allowing their customer to halt the work when cost exceeds value delivered. Why aren't all teams measuring Business Value? Dan Rawsthorne shows one way to do it.
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Should We Manage Both Features and Tasks?
Although it keeps people busy, managing tasks is neither interesting nor useful. Managing value created provides greater leverage and greater risk management. Jon Kern blogged last week on creating good features (rather than tasks) by focusing on value and testability. But do we sometimes need to manage tasks, too? David Anderson used the Theory of Constraints to back an unexpected answer.
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Discussion: "Decide as Late as Possible"
Lean Software Development says "decide as late as possible", but this goes against the grain for new Agile managers and team leads, who used to be responsible for careful up-front planning. Can this possibly be right? A group of ScrumMasters recently discussed the topic.
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Sign up for the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile 2006
The APLN Leadership Summit will be held at the Agile 2006 conference in Minneapolis on July 26 this year.