
Deployment Monoculture
In this talk from RubyFringe, Dan Grigsby talks about trying out many different ideas before turning one into a startup.
Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community

In this talk from RubyFringe, Dan Grigsby talks about trying out many different ideas before turning one into a startup.
Sun has released a whitepaper that describes the architecture used to host the Sun Blogs web application including a description of the hardware, the configuration of the server software, as well as a number of usage metrics.
Gartner analysts have written a letter from a fictional SOA architect/engineer to their CEO/CTO explaining why SOA has failed for them. Even though it is a work of fiction it does cover some interesting points.

How we customise Scrum to our local context plays a large role in the success or failure of a project. This article describes a successful, large, distributed Scrum project, which had already been scrapped once under a traditional approach. The authors share lessons learned on: project startup, product ownership, testing and the importance of estimates and effective communication.

This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, picked 5 very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results, and asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.
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!

InfoQ presents a one hour video from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, where a panel of business leaders spoke about their experiences: Bud Phillips (Capital One Financial), Israel Ganot (BMC Software), Steven Ambrose (DTE Energy), Peter George (Cronos Inc.). Topics included top-down vs. bottom-up adoption, making the leap of faith to enterprise adoption and the value of the PMO.

In this talk, recorded at QCon London, Mark Nottingham explains how Yahoo! leverages Web technologies, specifically HTTP-based caching using Squid, to create a high-performance architecture for integrating multiple Yahoo! properties, concluding that the Web provides sophisticated techniques without using SOA tooling such as ESBs.
Here is a story about Agile's use in a governmental organisation: at the 2006 APLN Leadership Summit Mark Salamango and John Cunningham looked at the problems and opportunities of introducing Agile in Army environments. True Agile practices cannot be 'commanded' or 'directed’ but frequent delivery offers Agile leaders a "soft" kind of power that is, in fact, very effective.
For those getting started with Agile, this book offers a detailed first-person account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a distributed team of 40 people, and how they continuously improved their process over a year’s time.