The Latest
Working Together—Not Just Working Together[magazine] People collaborate—and don't—in a variety of ways. Johanna Rothman examines what happens when collaboration isn't working, and how to make it work. Watch for several barriers to collaboration including those imposed on people by the organization itself. |
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Demystifying Exploratory Testing[magazine] Exploratory testing is a popular approach, but many testers secretly worry they might be doing it wrong. Jonathan Kohl addresses those concerns by explaining exploratory testing in ways that testers identify with. |
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The "One Right Way"[article] For those who believe there has to be one right way to do something, especially in software development - there can be. But that one way isn't likely to come from a single individual. Through collaboration and teamwork, some of the greatest single ideas have evolved. |
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Estimation Poker[article] Planning aoker, an estimating method popular with tgile teams can address some of these issues. Briefly, planning poker involves getting the developers on a team together to estimate stories using a deck of cards that have numbers that represent units of work. |
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Fixing the Quick Fix[article] Demands on businesses these days tend to make speed a priority—often at the expense of other areas. When it comes to correcting a problem in your organization, you should make sure you are, in fact, fixing the problem and not just a symptom. In this article, Esther Derby takes a look at the issue of the quick fix and offers some tips on how to get to the heart of the problem. |
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The Indivisible Task[article] One of the things that makes agile work well is a daily sense of progress that can be reflected in, for example, a burn-down chart. For burn-down charts to be meaningful, the estimate of amount of work remaining in a sprint need to be accurate. Re-estimating work remaining in a task is helpful, but the best measure of progress is the binary "done/not done" state of the items in your backlog. |
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97 Things Every Programmer Should Know is Done[article] The book 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts is finally available, and the title is on the mark. |
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Agile 2009 - Aslak Hellesoy - Cucumber Test Framework[article]
Podcast
Bob Payne got the opportunity to not just meet, but record this podcast with Aslak Hellesoy, at the Agile 2009 Conference. Bob and Aslak discuss the usage of the cucumber framework to facilitate automated regression testing at the story level. |
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The Truth about Practices and “Being” Agile-Lean[article] A working definition of “practice” is: A practice is a common and adaptive approach for doing something with a specific purpose in mind. When “being” agile and applying a practice we are focused on value-added not the means. |
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The Value of Concurrent Testing[article] Concurrent testing is the concept that as software is being developed, it is also being tested. Concurrent testing can be done in several ways; one of the most common is to perform testing at the system level. As a development team completes coding requirements for an application or system, this required code becomes testable, while other team members can execute test cases against the completed code.
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Managing Successful Agile Build Management Teams[article] While Agile methodologies have made tremendous advances in programming circles, build and release management teams have traditionally shied away from a “full agile” approach. In informal polling of Build Engineers, I found only one team outside of my own that ran an Agile shop; while there are many out there who do, there are tender points that need special consideration.
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Create and Maintain Product Roadmaps Using Agile Principles[article] Anupam Kundu describes an agile-enabled framework for product managers, project portfolio managers, and IT executives to develop and maintain a dynamic and flexible product roadmap. The product wing of the digital division of a publishing house adopted this collaborative framework to to charter their product roadmap and simultaneously enable their project team to see and understand the “big picture.” |
Anupam Kundu
February 9, 2010 |
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Agile Practitioners – Put Business Analysts to Work for You![article] The agile methodology, like many concepts, is based on an “ideal” setting or environment. In the agile domain this usually constitutes a 100% co-located team of generalists who have unfettered access to the primary business stakeholder. Working in an ideal environment makes sense when you are describing theory, but organizations can find this perfect environment unachievable due to basic business constraints: resource skill sets, location, and time allocation. These constraints present barriers to agile adoption, can hinder productivity, cause frustration amongst the team, and can lead to project failure.
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Agile Performance Testing[article] Approaching performance testing with a rigid plan and narrow specialization often leads to testers' missing performance problems or to prolonged performance troubleshooting. By making the process more agile, the efficiency of performance testing increases significantly—and that extra effort usually pays off multi-fold, even before the end of performance testing. |
Alexander Podelko
February 8, 2010 |
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Grooming the Product Backlog[article] The product backlog is the ultimate resource to making sure that your project sees the light of day, and of the highest quality possible. That is, as long as your backlog is given the attention it deserves, and needs. In this article we help you keep your backlog groomed to perfection. |