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  • Holacracy - The Self-Organizing Enterprise

    The fit between Agile teams and traditional enterprises can be challenging. Agile may highlight or exacerbate pre-existent dysfunctions, in areas a project manager may not be well-placed to address, so those involved in Agile roll-outs are thinking about alternate ways to organize the enterprise. Holacracy, created at Ternary Software, suggests that self-organization can extend outside IT.

  • 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.

  • Opinion: Code Coverage Stats Misleading

    John Casey recently spent some time refactoring Maven's assembly plugin, using coverage reporting to mark his progress and make sure he didn't break anything as he went. It didn't exactly go as planned - but at very least it was a learning experience. His conclusion: when you're seeking confidence through testing, perhaps the worst thing you can do is to look at a test coverage report.

  • Top Ten Web Service "Issues"

    What are your top ten Web service issues and advice? Andre Tost, Soccer fan and IBM Senior Technical Staff Member writes a bloglike article articulating the top ten issues he and his customers have with Web Services.

  • Five Habits of Highly Effective Software Developers

    What are some of the code-level practices of highly effective developers? Robert Miller wrote a detailed article on Java.NET covering 5 practices which could apply to any language, including minimalist constructors, methods with clear focus and intent, minimizing logic in mutating methods, and minimizing dependendies between behaviour methods.

  • Is Project Status Relative?

    Scott Ambler introduces a term for a familiar project phenomenon: the "green shift" that occurs when people rework status reports to make them more politically palatable to management. But can management actually handle the truth?

  • Tackle Testing Debt Incrementally

    Technical debt can shorten a product's life. But when technical debt mounts, it can be difficult to see how to pay it off. In her StickyMinds column, Johanna Rothman explains practices to help teams start paying off that debt - thereby easing their product's development and maintenance for a long time.

  • Towards the Optimal Javascript Inheritance Technique

    Lead developer of the ThinWire Java-based RIA framework Joshua Gertzen has written an article going over existing approaches to implementing OO inheritance in Javascript and presents the solution they ended up using on their product.

  • InfoQ Article: Why Would a .NET Programmer Learn Ruby on Rails?

    .NET developer Stephen Chu gives us some insight into his transition to Ruby on Rails programming. Quote: "By being loyal to one technology stack, I am bound to unconsciously make biased decisions, which will ultimately hinder my ability to deliver business value."

  • 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."

  • SOA Hot or Not

    Jeff Schneider of MomentumSI blogs what's "Hot" and whats "Not" in SOA, and a nice response from Joe McKendrick of ZDnet. InfoQ community, get your opinions on this heard! What are you involved in in SOA that's "Hot"?

  • InfoQ Article: Agile - The SOA Hangover Cure

    Carl Ververs, an expert on SOA Integration writes about the application of "Agile" development philosophies and methodologies in order to build a sustainable and valuable SOA system.

  • Best Practices for Planet-Scale Software Updates

    A new Microsoft research paper has examined data from billions of Windows update queries from 300 million computers using the Windows update service in order to learn about the traffic characteristics of software patch distribution and also examine alternative architectures (P2P and caching) to support planet-scale software updating.

  • Fowler Begins Updating Patterns of EAA Including GUI Patterns

    Martin Fowler has started working on an update to his acclaimed book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture over the last few months. One of the major areas of focus thus far has been patterns relating to GUI architectures.

  • How Should We Teach Design Patterns?

    Design patterns are a key to productive "refactoring", an Agile practice that keeps applications stable and maintainable, and a central aspect of Agile methodologies like XP. The 5th "Killer Examples" for Design Patterns and Objects workshop will take place at OOPSLA2006 in October, and will be looking at how to teach design patterns - apparently existing materials can be challenging for novices.

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