agile 2008 -Jon Stahl - Sustainable Fun for Agile Development
Podcast
Bob interviews Jon Stahl at the Agile 2008 conference. |
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Does Name Matter? The names we give to things can have a powerful influence on how we think about them and also on how we get others to think about them. In thiscolumn, tester, test manager, and consultant Fiona Charles examines names we have given to two essential roles in software development and explains why at least one of them is both inaccurate and a problem for testers. |
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Unit vs. System Testing-It's OK to be Different There are two distinct roles in many software projects that are involved with testing: developers and testers. Should they take the same approach to testing, or are there some principles that apply to only one of the roles? What should they do to coordinate their work? Danny Faught went through an exercise to compare and contrast and found that the questions he couldn't answer were as interesting as the questions he could answers. |
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Multitasking Is Evil Multitasking is often seen as a desirable skill—you can buy books or pay to attend courses that will teach you how to do it—but it is a surprisingly debilitating idea. |
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Keep Both Oars in the Water - Tips for Modeling Requirements If you hear that someone doesn't have "both oars in the water," you know he's out of control, he doesn't "get it," or he's going in circles. Why? To move forward in a rowboat, you need both oars in the water to steer and to gain speed. In this week's column, Mary Gorman explains how this concept applies to modeling requirements. |
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Integrating Agile Practices With a Global Delivery Model Agile development is getting increased attention from IT professionals all over the world. Agile practices help to overcome many of the challenges in traditional approaches with its emphasis on lightweight processes, flexibility to deal with changing business priorities, short delivery cycles, higher team collaboration, and a host of other benefits. Agile offers a fresh approach to businesses seeking greater agility in their software projects. |
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Infrastructure Refactoring Early implementations of Agile focused on brand new or newer product-lines. More recently, Agile is gaining acceptance in the legacy product space where the project teams are moving away from their company's traditional (aka, waterfall) methodology and moving toward an Agile approach. In these cases, the project team that begins to use Agile methods are typically inheriting an existing infrastructure that was constructed for a phased (aka, waterfall) approach. |
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Iterations Iteration is at the heart of agile development practices. In an agile project you do something, measure your progress, and then use the feedback from the measurement to figure out what to do next. This cycle allows you to follow the Agile Manifesto value Responding to change over following a plan by providing for points in time where you can measure your progress at the project level. Whether your approach to agile is project-focused like Scrum or development-focused, like extreme programming, iteration is what drives an agile project. |
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Social Network Analysis within Agile Teams It is possible to apply techniques borrowed from social network analysis) to software development teams. Once revealed, social networks can be actively or passively stimulated for the benefit of team formation and cohesion. Agile principles incorporate social network stimulation on an almost subliminal level; this is one of the reasons why agile principles work. |
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Silver Bullets, Theory, and Agility Software isn't hard, thinking is hard! "The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts ... I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct ..." Frederick P. Brooks Jr. Brooks suggests that the creation of a conceptual construct is the "irreducible essence" of software. Four properties contribute to the difficulty of creating such a construct: complexity, conformity, changeability, and invisibility. |
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