InfoQ Homepage Customers & Requirements Content on InfoQ
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Presentation: When Working Software Is Not Enough: A Story of Project Failure
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Mitch Lacey talks about a real life project that was on the verge of being successful, but was deemed as unsuccessful by the customer. Considering that "the true measure of project progress is working software", Mitch and his team delivered the software, but the client was not satisfied.
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Presentation: Do The Hustle
In this presentation at RubyFringe, Obie Fernandez shares his experience selling consulting services for both Thoughtworks and Hashrocket and gives advice on how developers/consultants can deal with clients by setting minimal requirements, saying "No" and how to choose hourly rates and much more.
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Presentation: Natural Laws of Software Development - Deriving Agile Practices
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson derive Agile practices from the natural laws of software development. They don't just say "Be Agile!", but they explain why Agile practices make perfect sense in the software development world.
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Prioritizing (the Backlog) For Profit
Having difficulty prioritizing the backlog? Luke Hohmann has described a method to make quantitative decisions about which backlog items should be considered first. In addition to the usual attributes such as implementation effort, Luke suggested adding attributes to measure stakeholders needs, strategic alignment and to ask whether the item is driving profit.
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Failures in Agile Development
The Agile software development community discusses it successes on a regular basis, but rarely do we publicly discuss our failures. Robin Dymond has taken the first step by documenting one of his.
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New User Story Format Emphasizes Business Value
User stories, a common format for capturing agile requirements, could be more focused on business value. A traditional format for stating a user story is: "As a <type of user> I want <some functionality> so that <some benefit>." A value-centric replacement would be: "In order to <achieve some value>, as a <type of user>, I want <some functionality>."
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Presentation: Intentional Software
Business users doing programming? Charles Simonyi and Henk Kolk presents how Intentional Software offers a radical new software approach that separates business knowledge from software engineering knowledge, which means that business experts can be more innovative and responsive to the changes in the domain.
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Presentation: Business Natural Languages Development in Ruby
In this presentation, Jay Fields introduces his concept of Business Natural Languages (BNL). BNLs are a type of Domain Specific Language, designed to be readable by any subject matter expert, which allows to create maintainable specifications and documentation. The example languages are implemented using Ruby.
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Debate: Should Architecture Rewrite be Avoided?
As it gets more and more difficult to adapt software to new demands, the temptation to rebuild it in order to update the architecture grows stronger. For this risky undertaking it is essential to choose the right strategy. Several authors provide insights into advantages and disadvantages of different possible options in terms of cost, technical complexity and potential commercial risk.
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InfoQ Video: Practices of an Agile Developer
At NFJS Venkat Subramaniam, co-author with Andy Hunt of "Practices of an Agile Developer," shared his pragmatic approach to some of the important technical and non-technical factors contributing to project success, including: coding, developer attitude, debugging, mentoring and feedback.
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Should the Customer Care about Agile?
The involvement of customer in an Agile project is taken for granted, however in many situations, intentionally or unintentionally, the customer may not follow the Agile practices. An interesting discussion on the Extreme Programming group tries to decipher the situation and find possible solutions.
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Bedtime User Stories: Cowboys and Fairytales
In which David Longstreet claims Agile Software Development is a Fairy Tale that just tries to legitimise Cowboy development, and Geoff Slinker invites him to write a Serious Article based on Logical Arguments and Citing Sources.
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The Future Of Functional Testing
Jennitta Andrea & Ward Cunningham recently hosted a WebCast on 'Envisioning the Next Generation of Functional Test Tools'. Also, towards the end of last year Thoughtworks' announced its intention to release a next generation functional testing tool. InfoQ investigates the growing momentum for change in the area of functional testing and how the thought leaders in this area see it developing.
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White: A New Windows UI Developer Testing Framework
The White project is an automated testing framework for Win32, WinForm, WPF and SWT (java) applications. Use it in combination with your favorit xUnit framework just like WatiN to perform user acceptance testing.
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InfoQ Presentation: Selecting the Right Methodology and Steering it to Success
It's easy to agree with "anything more than 'barely sufficient' in is waste," but it's more complicated when we actually need to customize a process for a particular project. At Agile2006 Todd Little shared a model to help leaders choose the right flavour of Agile based on project and team attributes, and he emphasised the need to actively steer projects as development progresses.