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Agile Development
Practices
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Welcome to the
Configuration Management Journal from CM Crossroads a monthly
publication that focuses on a wide variety of
configuration management and related development topics.
In a recent CM
Crossroads research study, we found that over 85% of the respondents were
very interested in deploying agile development practices in their projects,
but we also found that less than 10% had more than
one agile development project underway. This leads me to believe that
while there is great interest achieving agility in application development, a
great majority of organizations are struggling to pull it off.
With those number's in mind, and
because so many organizations are looking for direction with adopting more
agile development practices, we have launched a new online magazine, the Agile Journal led by
Editor-in-Chief and former Giga/Forrester analyst Liz Barnett - [www.agilejournal.com].
The Agile Journal is dedicated to helping developers use Agile techniques and
technologies to deliver successful software solutions. No other publication
or industry portal is providing such substantive vendor-neutral content for
Agile teams. In the Agile Journal, you'll receive thought leadership and
pragmatic advice from a wide range of industry experts, as well as direct
feedback from hands-on developers and project
And so, although we are focusing
on Agile Development Practices this month in the CM Journal, in the future
we will look to Liz Barnett to provide her insight and leadership on the
topic of agile development in the Agile Journal
As always I look forward to your
comments and suggestions in the
Letters to the Editors Forum at CM Crossroads.
Patrick Egan
Publisher / Editor
editor@cmcrossroads.com
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Agile SCM |
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Situational Code Ownership: Dynamically Balancing
Individual vs. Collective Ownership
by Robert Cowham, Brad Appleton and
Steve Berczuk
One of the commonly touted programming
practices of several agile methods is something called
collective code ownership, where anyone on the team can
make any authorized functional change or design quality
improvement (e.g., a "refactoring") to any file within
the scope of their task. The Agile method known as
Feature-Driven Development (FDD), featured in another
article this month, is one of the few agile methods that
uses the more restrictive model of individual code
ownership to restrict changes to a class/module to be
made by its assigned "owner."
[Read
More] |
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<Sponsored By ALM Expo> |
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Feature-Driven Development - an Agile Alternative to
Extreme Programming
by
Brad Appleton
Many people today judge all of "Agile
development" based on what they know about Extreme
Programming (XP), quite possibly because that is all or
most of what they've heard about agile development. I
wish all of those folks (especially agile skeptics)
would take a close look at Feature-Driven Development (FDD)
if for no other reason than because it is an example of
an agile method that is very different from XP. FDD is
quite agile while still employing of many of the
traditional practices that agile skeptics are probably
more accustomed to seeing.
[Read
More] |
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CM Crossroads Webcast Series |
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Taking Control of Your Dependencies: Dependency
Management in Production Automation
Thursday, May 04, 2006 - 2 PM
Eastern - 11 AM Pacific
Dependencies are perhaps the biggest potential source of
problems for build teams. The improper handling of
dependencies cause build failures, impede build speed
improvement efforts and can create administrative
headaches for the build team. In these situations, the
build team is often left between a rock and a hard
place: responsible for delivering builds under
conditions that are beyond their ability to describe let
alone manage.
The speakers will share their thoughts and experiences
on ways the build team can better characterize and
communicate build-specific dependency issues. Using
these tools, the build team can begin to influence
development decision making, increasing organizational
performance and agility.
[Register
now and enter to win an Apple iPod] |
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Road
to Quality |
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[Road to Quality] Agility and Quality
by Alan S. Koch
What is "Quality"? There are many competing
definitions, mainly because the one that makes the most
sense, "Quality is in the eye of the beholder," is hard
to make workable in a real business situation. Some
would say it is impossible to use. But the Agile methods
beg to differ. The Agile methods take just such an
approach to quality by letting the customer mould the
quality of the product that is being built. They
acknowledge that different people might see things in
different ways, so the one party to the project whose
opinion counts most (the ultimate customer) is the one
to whom the Agile methods look.
What constitutes high quality on this project? Don't ask
me! Ask your customer!
[Read
More] |
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<Sponsored By Aldon> |
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Managing Dispersed Development Teams for Productivity
by Rich Bianchi
The traditional approach to managing
productivity is that employees punch a clock – in at 8,
out at 5 – and employers must assume work is being done
during the intervening hours. However, the current
reality for many, if not most, businesses, is that the
traditional approach no longer works. It has become
unclear whether or not work is being accomplished
regardless of
hours logged at the office. With the increase in
outsourced and offshore teams, many developers are
scattered across different states or even different
continents and throughout a variety of time zones. As a
result, it’s not possible for a manager to ‘swing by’ a
developer’s cube to get a status update on a project or
even just to do a quick check that a team
member is present and productive.
[Read
More] |
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CM Crossroads Webcast Series |
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ASK Mr. Make Webcast Series: 12 Tasty 'Make' Recipes, Part 1
Thurs. April 27 - 1:00 PM Eastern /
10:00 AM Pacific / 1800 UTC
Expand your software build repertoire --
join us for the first in a series of discussions of
practical techniques for enhancing and optimizing your
GNU Make Makefiles. In this session, John Graham-Cumming
presents three "recipes" for improving Makefiles. Recipe
1 shows how to find the name of the Makefile currently
being handled by make; recipe 2 shows how a build
manager can force an engineer to set the right options
before running Make; recipe 3 makes Makefiles
self-documenting. If your builds are not as fast or as
reliable as you would like them to be, this is one
presentation you will not want to miss.
[Register
now and enter to win a 60 GB VideoiPod] |
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Agile – It’s Not the Wild West
by Mario Moreira
Agile methods for software development are
one of the hottest movements in the methodology field.
Agile methods provide a means of adapting quickly for
teams facing unpredictable or rapidly changing
requirements. Agile introduces a structured approach to
software development (more structured than most
"bandwagon" enthusiasts realize). This structure ensures
that the
customer gets early and periodic views of their solution
for continuous feedback, more assurance that they get a
solution that solves their business needs, and a working
solution in typically a shorter timeframe.
Unfortunately, some folks think Agile is the "wild west"
of methodologies and think it provides them license to
throw-out all process and documentation.
Those who think this are sadly mistaken and give Agile a
black eye.
[Read
More] |
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Product Review |
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mValent Integrity 3.0.3 Facilitates the Management of
J2EE Application Infrastructure
Environments -
by Michael Sayko
IT organizations are
looking for new levels of productivity. In an era of
relative talent shortages, the ability to seize business
opportunities depends on making dramatic increases in
productivity.
At the same time, the government has raised the bar
substantially with governance mandates such as
Sarbanes-Oxley. Add to this globalization, outsourcing
and distributed work forces that have the effect making
even smaller companies manage teams over geographic and
time zones. However, the coming whammy is the dramatic
loss of talent looming up as baby-boomers retire.
[Read
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CM: THE NEXT
GENERATION - Agile Configuration Management
by Joe Farah
What is agile CM? If you think it's doing
the minimal amount of CM, think again. Instead, it's
minimizing and streamlining the work to do all of the CM
tasks that are necessary. It adapts to changing CM
requirements fairly easily. Agile CM doesn't just happen
- it's a combination of good CM process, good CM tools,
and CM automation. If you fall short on any of these,
your CM process will not be very agile.
[Read
More] |
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