InfoQ Homepage Management Content on InfoQ
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Visual Risk Management
Irrespective of the size of the project, stakeholders feel confident when they can a keep track of the risks and their mitigation strategies. Agile heavily promotes the use of information radiators. Keeping in line with the philosophy of radiators, Agilists suggested different ways of depicting risks visually for easy tracking and mitigation.
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FAI: Automated Install, Management and Customization for Linux
FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) is a non-interactive system to avoid the boring and repeating task of installing, customizing and managing Linux systems manually. FAI is used for maintaining chroot environments, virtual machines as well as physical boxes in setups ranging from a few single systems up to deployments of large-scale infrastructures and clusters with several thousands of systems.
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Agile Team Spaces: Do's and Don'ts
Many of us, who are new to Agile, would believe that putting an Agile team together in a room gets the job done. A few of us would actually pay attention to what makes a room a team room which can enhance productivity and motivation. Many Agile teams have already shared their perspective on what would make an ideal team room. Here are a few recent ones.
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Puppet: Ruby-based Server Management Automation Suite
The team at Reductive Labs recently announced the release of version 0.25.2 of Puppet, the open source Ruby-based configuration management and automation tool for Linux and Unix servers. In this software bug-fix release, 123 open tickets were closed, and the developers claim a reduced memory footprint, improved error reporting, threading, and lock contention (a source of reported system hangs).
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What Really Motivates Workers
In a recent Harvard Business Review article Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J Kramer challenged the commonly held mnagement belief that Recognition is the most motivating and positive factor in the workplace. Their multi-year study tracked the motivation and emotions of hundreds of knowledge workers and identified POGRESS as the single most important factor for individual motivation in the workplace
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Agile is Micromanagement
Micromanagement, often has a negative connotation associated with it. It is a management style where a manager closely observes or controls the work of his or her subordinates or employees. Usually Agile development and micromanagement may seem to be opposite ends of spectrum however, they are more related than what meets the eye.
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What is a Good Agile Metric?
What is an appropriate Agile Metric? If traditional measures like: Earned Value, Hours Worked, Lines of Code, Code Coverage for Tests are not well suited to Agile Projects, then what is? What rules can we define that will help us choose good Agile metrics?
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Is Leading Self-Organisation like Conducting an Orchestra?
Traditional management models don't tell leaders how to support their Agile teams without undermining their emerging self-organisation. Allusions to musical performance and "conducting the orchestra" abound - but not all are in agreement. Is the "conductor" model a good practice or an anti-pattern? In his TED talk, conductor Itay Talman shows that it may depend on what we think a conductor does.
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Agile's "One Essential Ingredient"
There has been plenty of debate on what skills a developer needs, or what practices an organization must adopt for agile to be successful. But while undeniably important, is this really what's at the heart of agile success? Mark Schumann suggests that agile's "one essential ingredient" is not ground-level agile technique, but rather is the agile mindset within management ranks.
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Management Strategies For SOA
Mike Kavis, wrote an article for the SOA institute in which he characterizes the success of any SOA implementation into four factors people, process, technology, and business. He believes that a good management strategy is to create and communicate a roadmap that plots out key deliverables in each of these areas.
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Leading Lean & Agile – it’s all about people
Mary and Tom Poppendieck have published a new book titled "Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are Not the Point" in which they examine the importance of leadership in Lean/Agile transformations and provide guidance for organisations making the transformation.
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Retrospective of Retrospectives
Once all your teams use Agile and are busy implementing local improvements, what happens to the larger organization formerly called "IT" or "Systems Development"? A coach with a large Agile program shared the strategy they designed to let the larger community spot trends and benefit from all this learning. Paulo Caroli calls it "Retrospective of Retrospectives".
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DeMarco Reflects on 40 Years of Software Engineering Evolution
40 years after the NATO Conference on Software Engineering, Tom DeMarco paused to reflect on the discipline's evolution, wondering whether the metrics orientation he championed has distracted from the real point of computing: "transformation, creating software that changes the world." Is his earlier advice valid, though? "No", he said, in Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?
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Agile Project Sponsorship – A Light Hand for Effective Results
Organisations embracing Agile methods need to reassess their approach to project governance and sponsorship. Project decisions need to be made rapidly, responding to changes in the organisational ecosystem while keeping a clear eye on the project’s and organisation’s goals. Advice from commentators on project sponsorship and important metrics to keep projects on track.
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Article: The Economics of Service Orientation
This article explores the structural economic changes brought about by service orientation and how the concept of services and reuse at the service level promises to relieve the enormous pressure arising from increasing costs and flat budgets. Service orientation is compared to other strategies for keeping costs in check.