The Latest

According to Brian Marick, software is little more than a service that has been made into an easily mass-produced form. Because of that, software may be attractive only to its creators—but it still should serve its users faithfully.

Keeping source code functional in the midst of ongoing changes can be tricky, but there are tools available to help you keep bad code under control. In his article, Tom Copeland puts the spotlight on PMD, an open source static analysis tool that can illuminate source code problems and help power up your build process.

Boris Gloger talks about his work with Product Owner Teams and the state of Agile in Europe, as well as several strategies to unify multiple customers into a single voice.

Peter Coffee delivered a keynote that was both informative and inspiring, tying four of his favorite books back to the Agile Manifesto.

Conflict is inevitable at work. Sooner or later, you will disagree about what to test, when to test, or how long to test software. How you and the person you disagree with approach the conflict affects both the outcome and how you feel about the exchange. In this column, Esther Derby explains some of the ways people approach conflict and how they affect solutions and relationships.

IT organizations view the adoption of agile development methods as a way of bringing an "integrated team" approach to the product development lifecycle where everyone is focused on early, frequent demonstrated results. The second shared goal is service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is an approach to deliver integrated component-based ecosystems that are assembled to efficiently execute critical business processes. The goal of SOA is to be flexible and adaptive to the constantly changing business climate. These two productive approaches, when applied concurrently, are setting the stage for the next evolution in the deployment of technology to enhance business performance and results.

Because one of the core stated objectives of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is to increase business and IT alignment and IT's flexibility in meeting changing business needs, on the surface it would seem that SOA and agile methods are a natural fit.  And within the SOA model of service production, distribution and consumption, use of agile development methods clearly has great opportunity for effectiveness on the consumption side of the equation. However, the approach by which a suite of generally reusable services within an SOA are defined and produced requires a cross-project perspective that could be viewed as running counter to a typical agile development approach. Some amount of up-front architectural thought must go into initial service definition to prevent those services being developed from becoming solely project-centric.