Agile Tips and Techniques
Agile Planning Process
Plans are worthless, planning is essential. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower One of the myths about Agile is that it is disorganized coding with no documentation or regard to planning. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, planning is one of... [Read more...]
Automated Testing Enables Agility
Automating tests at the unit and acceptance level are the "grease that helps the wheel turn" on Agile teams. Does automated testing take extra time? When you're first starting, yes. However, you must consider automated... [Read more...]
Code Oversight
A relatively important practice in Agile is the use of multiple pairs of eyeballs to help ensure that the code that is being delivered is of the highest quality possible. Quality in the context means low defects, good design, adherence to local... [Read more...]
Coding Standard
For a team to work effectively in pairs, and to share ownership of all the code, all the developers need to write the code in the same way, with rules that ensure the code communicates clearly. The specifics of the coding standard aren't all that... [Read more...]
Collective Ownership
All of the system artifacts belong to the entire team. This allows the team to continuously move forward, avoiding bottlenecks caused by islands of knowledge in the team. This improves flow and thus productivity, and reduces the risk that work will... [Read more...]
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is a practice in which the team checks in and builds the software system as often as possible. This keeps all the programmers on the same page, and enables very rapid progress. Perhaps surprisingly, integrating more frequently tends... [Read more...]
Frequent, Small Releases
The developers put a simple system into production early, and update it frequently on a very short cycle. This makes the software 'visible' to the Product Owner and Stakeholders, and is a much better indicator of concrete progress that updating... [Read more...]
Iteration Planning
Iterative Development is a key element to adding agility to the development process. The development schedule for a release should be divided into iterations of about 1-3 weeks in length. This length is kept constant, despite pressures to increase length... [Read more...]
Know Your Done State
Knowing when a Story or Feature is ready to be put into production, the Done State, is critical. It doesn't matter if the developers believe that they're done, or even if QA says a feature is done, if the the business people for whom the... [Read more...]
Managing Scope Creep
Many people have said that embracing change in Agile leads to scope creep and churning, and in the end nothing gets delivered. Consider this analogy: You're renovating a bathroom, and you planned to change the sink & vanity, reuse your... [Read more...]
Onsite Product Owner
Lack of user involvement traditionally has been the No. 1 reason for project failure. Conversely, it has been the leading contributor to project success. Even when delivered on time and on budget, a project can fail if it doesn't meet user needs... [Read more...]
Project Velocity
The use of the term "Velocity" is very deliberate in Agile. Velocity is defined as the rate of change of position over time along a straight line. It is a vector quantity, adding the dimension of direction to the scalar value of speed. This... [Read more...]
Refactoring
Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called... [Read more...]
Release Planning
The development team needs to release incremental versions of the system to the customers as often as possible. Release Planning is used to discover small units of functionality that make good business sense and can be released into the customer's... [Read more...]
Retrospectives – Improving Your Process
Agile teams strive for continuous improvement. Just as Refactoring is used to improve the design of the code, Retrospectives are used to improve how the team works. Traditionally, retrospectives were held at the end of a project and were commonly known... [Read more...]
Simple Design
A program built using an Agile process should be the simplest program that meets the current requirements. There is not much building for the future. Instead, the focus is on providing business value. Of course it is necessary to ensure that a good design... [Read more...]
Spike
There are situations in which the developers simply don't know enough about a Story to be able to provide and estimate. In that case, they would perform what's known as a Spike. The Spike is simply a quick, throwaway proof of concept to allow... [Read more...]
Standup Meeting
Each day, the team gathers for a very short meeting to discuss the current situation on the project. For this meeting, everyone stands in order to avoid long detailed discussions. This is the Standup Meeting, and is used to allow everyone to keep their... [Read more...]
Sustainable Pace
Tired team members make more mistakes. Airline pilots, truck drivers and other occupations that require sharp concentration mandate the maximum number of hours that can be worked. That doesn't apply to the software industry, and the overall... [Read more...]
Test-Driven Development (TDD)
Many Agile teams use the philosophy of Test-Driven Development (TDD), in which the unit tests are written before the code. Then, just enough production code is written to allow the test to compile, but not pass. The unit test is executed to ensure that... [Read more...]
Use Retrospectives to Improve
Agile teams use Retrospectives at two levels – at the end of each Iteration, and at the end of each Release. In both cases, the goal is to identify not only what didn't work well for the team, but to acknowledge what did work well. It's... [Read more...]
User Stories
A User Story is a short description of the behavior of the system from the point of view of the Product Owner. They are in the format of about three sentences of text written in the Customer’s terminology without technical jargon. In simplistic... [Read more...]
User Story Estimation
The Developers estimate the relative effort involved to implement the User Stories. This is an important point, because traditionally the developers have had estimates imposed on them. By 'owning' the estimates, the developers not only have a... [Read more...]
User Story Examples
Quite often it's difficult to get started writing User Stories for the first time. Here are some sample User Stories that may provide some guidance. In general, though, there are a few guidelines you can follow to make a good story: Short Title with... [Read more...]
Watch for Technical Debt
Any code base will contain build up Technical Debt over time. This is even more true for code that does not have any automated tests. You can easily see the symptoms of Technical Debt: Velocity begins to erode – the team spends as much or... [Read more...]
Yesterday’s Weather
It is said that if you forecast the weather for the next day based on today's weather, you will be correct 70% of the time. This concept is used to determine how much work for which the developers can sign up in any given iteration. The total number... [Read more...]
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