InfoQ Homepage Stories & Case Studies Content on InfoQ
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Agile Addresses "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team"
Tathagat Varma, general manager with a large provider of IT management solutions, wondered whether Agile's productivity improvements could be linked to how it improves teamwork. His article analyses Agile values and practices by mapping them against Patrick Lencioni's business fable "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team."
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Observations on Lean in Action in Japan
What did a group of Agilists see when they "went to the gemba" in Japan to observe Lean in action? Here is a roundup of observations from bloggers and newsgroup writers on this spring's "Roots of Lean" tour to Japan, led by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. The tour visited both manufacturing and software organizations, and included Henrik Kniberg, Sune Gynthersen, & Gabrielle Benefield, among others.
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FriendFeed Implements Schema-less Storage Atop MySQL
Brett Taylor, founder of FriendFeed, describes how they overcame some limitations of MySQL to handle problems of scaling and database evolution by implementing a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL.
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How to Ensure Early Death of a Distributed Agile Project?
Challenges of Agile adoption and execution get amplified when working in a distributed mode. Distributed Agile brings its own share of challenges in terms of geographical separation, varied timezone, cultural differences etc. Killing a distributed Agile project is not very difficult.
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Considering a RESTful Approach to Net-Centricity in DoD
A recent article makes a case for the REST architectural style using a Department of Defense’s project, called Net-Centric Data Strategy (NCDS), as an example. The authors argue that some of the core objectives of NCDS can be more naturally supported by the four basic principles of REST.
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Interview: Dan Grigsby Shares Secrets of Successful Entrepreneurship
In this interview made by InfoQ’s Rob Bazinet during RubyFringe 2008, Dan Grigsby talks about programming and entrepreneurship, how a programmer can take his idea and transform it into a successful product.
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Optaros and MuleSource Help Nespresso With Next-Generation SOA Solution
Nestlés Nespresso SA division, which is headquartered in Paudex, Switzerland, recently announced the successful completion the first phase of their SOA initiative 'NesOA' in just six months! Optaros and MuleSource helped define and implement a new middleware architecture called Nespresso Open Architecture, or NesOA.
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Burn Stories Not Tasks
Developers commonly break user stories into tasks to facilitate distributing the implementation work across the team, and allow tracking of progress at a finer level of granularity. Unfortunately, a story can explode into a list of non-trivial tasks so large that the story is not deliverable by the end of the iteration. Ron Jeffries suggests: "Do stories as a unit, not broken into tasks."
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Sun Blogs System Architecture Whitepaper
Sun has released a whitepaper that describes the architecture used to host the Sun Blogs web application including a description of the hardware, the configuration of the server software, as well as a number of usage metrics.
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The Generic SOA Failure Letter
Gartner analysts have written a letter from a fictional SOA architect/engineer to their CEO/CTO explaining why SOA has failed for them. Even though it is a work of fiction it does cover some interesting points.
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MS Experience Yields Distributed Agile "Dos and Don'ts"
Ade Miller has published a paper on distributed agile development, highlighting the challenges of trying to do distributed agile development, along with recommendations for addressing these challenges based primarily on the experiences of teams within the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft.
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Survey Says ... SOA Failure?!
Assaf Arkin questions a recent report indicating SOA failures and Joe McKendrick of ZDNet examines the meaning of SOA failure in his article.
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I.T. SOA vs Business SOA?
In a recent blog post Jeff Schneider talks about I.T. SOA and Business SOA, terms that he hears from the likes of IBM and SAP, who now assume that I.T. SOA is in well ensconced with their customers. Jeff believes that this is a good move and industry should concentrate on making a success of Business SOA if users are to really see success from adopting SOA.
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Renowned Orchestra Embraces Scrum-like Practices
A Scrum team has no designated leader; the team is expected to self-organize. Similarly, one of the world's most renowned orchestras has dispensed entirely with the role of conductor in favor of a process where leadership is shared and decisions are made by the team. Along the way, they have learned lessons and ways of working together that any Scrum team can benefit from.
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Stories of Scrum Adoption in China
This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, looked at five very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results. He asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.