InfoQ Homepage Delivering Value Content on InfoQ
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Agile Practices with the Highest Return on Investment
Return on Investment is a critical factor for decision making pertaining to following a particular software development practice. The post summarizes the ROI benefits of Agile and the inexpensive practices which lead to highest return on investment.
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Could the Solution to IT's Problems be less IT-Business Alignment?
The never ending debate about the role, the relevance or the organization of IT has added yet another frustration moment. Susan Cram, an industry expert, shared the 8 things -she thinks- we hate about IT. In her analysis, she points out a surprising remedy: avoiding the IT alignment trap.
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Should your architecture focus on SOA or BPM?
While SOA was the big name in the buzzword tag cloud, BPM is quickly getting bigger and bigger. As organizations are becoming more aware of the need to tame their processes in order to get the benefits of IT investments, BPM is gaining importance and mindshare inside and outside of IT. Is one more important for your architecture?
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Impediments To Your Value-Stream
Scrum defines an impediment as "anything keeping the team from being more productive" and clearly stresses that teams establish means to remove them as continuously as possible. Joe Little proposes an impediment's scope may be better established as being anything keeping the organization from delivering value.
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Understanding Business Value
Aside from "Agile" itself, "Business Value" may be one of the most widely used buzzwords around the floors of any fresh agile project. But, how many of these projects actually have a good understanding of what they really mean when they're saying it? Joe Little presents his thoughts on this very question.
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Overburdened Teams are Less Likely to Root Out Waste
Sometimes, management encourages adoption of Agile but fails to help remove the overburden that cripples teams and keeps them in non-productive patterns. In his article, Roman Pichler looks at the "3 M's" of Lean, and how the concept of removing "muri" (overburden) provides help for Agile adoptions, by encouraging teams to give up wishful thinking and commit to their actual capacity.
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Pragmatic is the new black - Reality Driven Development
Taking an empirical approach, Reality Driven Development promotes the idea of rigorous experimentation as a way to improve the user experience and technical qualities of software development.
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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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Discussion: Measuring Success of an Agile Project from the Customer’s Perspective
A recent discussion on the Scrum Development list looked at: “How does a customer measure the success of an Agile project?” Emphasis on: “measure”. The discussion seemed to agree that clients do need a way to track success in their terms, and various metrics were suggested, though it was agreed: it depends on the situation and the customer.
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Prefer Broad Design Skills over Platform Knowledge
In his latest article Martin Fowler suggests that what matters most while building a team is not experience or thorough knowledge of the specific platform and business domain, but rather some broader skills that allow building quality software and delivering value.
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Is Velocity Really the Golden Measurement?
What value do teams get from measuring velocity, beyond the ability to reasonably estimate commitments for the short-term future? J.B. Rainsberger proposes that teams spend less energy scrutinizing velocity and more energy thoughtfully identifying and eliminating areas of waste in their projects.
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Doer vs. Talker: Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
In Are You a Doer or a Talker? Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror echoes the agile manifesto's 'Valuing working software over comprehensive documentation.' Noting an article by John Taber, Atwood draws parallels between transportation studies and transportation construction projects.
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An Agile Developer's Responsibility
What is a developer's responsibility when a customer asks for a quick and dirty solution? Should they listen to the customer and take the short cut because, after all, they are paying the bill? Should they instead always do what is technically the "best" option in their opinion? Or is there a middle road that should be taken?
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Charming the Army: the Power of Delivery
Here is a story about Agile's use in a governmental organisation: at the 2006 APLN Leadership Summit Mark Salamango and John Cunningham looked at the problems and opportunities of introducing Agile in Army environments. True Agile practices cannot be 'commanded' or 'directed’ but frequent delivery offers Agile leaders a "soft" kind of power that is, in fact, very effective.
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Can architecture create a gap between developers and software they build?
Many software project management and architecture approaches tend to parcel out work on a project in a way to create hierarchical layers. This helps simplify both developers’ work and management. However, the underlying information shielding among layers can potentially create a gap between developers and the software they are building, if their tasks are totally taken out of functional context.