InfoQ's AgileQ team has decided to publish more community articles. In the summer we will be publishing one article a week starting mid-june. If you have something valuable to share and are interested in publishing with InfoQ, here are some topics that you might consider:
- Business case: “Business value” is an all too easily promised result of adopting Agile practices, but we have yet to build an effective vocabulary with executives with responsibilities vastly larger than the success of one or two software teams. These are articles that you can give to your boss, or your boss’s boss, to help them understand how Agile development can help and why they should seriously give it a try.
- Human aspects: There is a growing body of knowledge in the community that examines human dynamics and relationships that underpin all successful teams. Much of this work is taken from other disciplines.
- Basics: Introductory materials for those who want to learn the basics of Agile development and practices.
- Adoption: How-to articles that examine the process of successfully using Agile practices.
- Principles and values: Agile practices derive from a set of core principles and values. Understanding of these principles and values enable teams to adapt Agile practices to fit their contexts.
- Large organizations: More than ever, Agile software development is being adopted in large organizations that have completely different contexts and constraints than the smaller projects and companies where Agile development got its start. To get the promised benefits from Agile practices are changed, adapted, and sometimes dropped all together to survive these different environments.
- New ideas: These articles might not fall in the accepted definition of Agile development. This is very important as practitioners mold their understanding of Agile development to increasingly diverse situations, and address an ever-growing set of issues and problems.
- Book reviews: If you've read a really good book and want to tell others about it, consider writing a book review describing the content and why it would be useful to others in the field.
Once you have the topic, here are the nuts & bolts of writing an article for us:
- All articles are accepted/rejected based on an article and not an abstract. If you would like feedback regarding the suitability of a topic, by all means send us an abstract.
- Do your best to have specific take-aways from the article. A reader of your article must be able to walk away with a set of actions to perform, a new theory to think about, or a thought-provoking question to answer.
- Your article should be no less than 1200 words and no more than 8000 words. If you are new to writing articles, we suggest that you keep the article small and concise.
- Hyperlinks will work for online readers, but please supply endnotes so the document stands on its own when printed.
- Send your first draft our editors and a member of our editorial staff will work with you iteratively to prepare the article for publication and set a date.
- Before publishing we will need a short bio, a 200 word abstract, and a 400 word abstract of your article.
We invite each and every reader to consider sharing their experiences with the rest of the community by contributing articles on any of the subjects listed above.
