Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
Testing Tools to
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Whitepaper
Educator Dr. Dave West discusses “Systems Development”, a new discipline emphasizing humanity, craft, design, creativity, innovation, and emergence - in stark contrast with current university disciplines. West proposes a better educational experience, replacing the sterility of today’s classrooms and labs with the workshop, or “bottega.”
Building on the success of last year’s metaphor of festival with multiple stages, the Agile Alliance has gone with the same approach this year. The idea behind the stages is to make what has become a large conference a smaller place so that sessions with similar themes will end up on the same stage. As a result, attendees who're focused on a few themes will see the same people again and again.
On many occasions various members of the agile community have complained that the Scrum Certification is meaningless because almost everyone who takes the class gets a certificate. As of Jan 1. 2009 that will no longer be the case.
At Agile 2008, Don McGreal and Michael McCullough ran a session that showed how to use games and exercises to help improve our understanding of Agile principles and practices. After the conference they created the Tasty Cupcakes as a repository for all Agile games.
How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.
Agile conferences are receiving an influx of novice teams and managers, and some suggest that new conferences should be organized for these beginners. To the contrary, this report from XPday Montreal suggests that mixing up expertise levels creates a valuable experience for all.
"Ruby is risky" is a common perception. As Ruby on Rails moves closer to the mainstream, that risk will decrease. In this article, Bruce Tate examines the changing risk profiles for Java and Ruby from a managers perspective, examining Java's initial adoption and also common risk myths about Rails.
At QconLondon 2007 Jim Coplien spoke with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas for InfoQ. This energetic 30-minute interview runs the gamut of Dave's wide-ranging interests: 'agile' publishing; how to turn what you love doing into a book; programming (and methodology) monocultures; staying limber with code "katas"; and advice for academics: help your students live with the passion of a 5-year old!
Venkat Subramaniam, international trainer and co-author with Dave Thomas of "Practices of an Agile Developer", talks about his passion for improving project success by incrementally implementing an Agile approach, specifically addressing large projects and projects in trouble.
Scrum, arguably the fastest-growing Agile methodology, is well described in the original Scrum books, which tend to be read once and put aside. The SPRiNT-iT coaches have abstracted the basics to produce a compact reference to help teams facilitate all Scrum meetings and create the Scrum artifacts. The book doesn't teach Scrum, but offers trained teams confidence to run their first successful Sprints - successes that will increase the acceptance of Scrum in their organization.
