The Latest

"Part-timers just don't seem to fit in with the team," a manager complained to Esther Derby recently. "I do everything I can to impress on them the importance of teamwork and team spirit, but they just don't gel with the team. What can I do to motivate these people to fit in?" In this column, Esther Derby reveals the truth of the part-timers' mindset and what you can do to motivate this group.

Every system has an architecture, even systems developed using agile methodologies. Whether you attempt to define that architecture up front in detail or whether it emerges over time is up to you. My experience is that most agile teams follow a strategy somewhere between these two extremes. That strategy, combined with proving your architectural ideas as soon as possible through working code. This article summarizes a collection of strategies for addressing architectural concerns on agile projects and discusses how such strategies can be applied to scale agile methods to large development efforts.

The more complicated the system to test, the bigger the headache. Chris Meisenzahl takes a look at how you can take the pain out of testing complicated software systems with VMware’s virtualization tools—VMware Player, VMware Workstation, VMware Server, and VMware ESX Server.

With Apple's conversion to Windows-capable, Intel-based architecture as his jumping off point, Tod Golding takes a look at how we tend to view new technologies through our old perceptions. As technology evolves for the better, he explains, we too must grow out of old rhetoric.

From providing the likes of Pong boxes to a tiny, niche market to creating graphic-intensive productions that rival the income of Hollywood's box office, the video game industry has boomed in a very short period of time. Find out how agile methods helped one video game studio make the transition.

If you've run through the standard design approaches and still need that killer test case, try mind maps.

When we read about agile development, we find developers using nUnit for unit testing while customers are using FIT for acceptance tests. But where are the testers? You know--those folks who have years of experience in testing.