dev8D | Lightning talk: Agile Development
This is a great post on agile development coming out from the JISC Dev8d days.
Example from the floor, Matthew: what worked well in a commercial company I was working for where we practiced extreme coding and used agile principles was: no code ownership (bound by strict rules), test-based development, rules about simplicity, never refactoring until you have to, stand up meetings, whiteboard designs, iterations so could find out when you’d messed something up almost immediately, everything had to have unit tests, there has to be a lot of trust in the system (you have to know that someone is not going to break your code)
Graham: building trust is central. via dev8D | Lightning talk: Agile Development.
The quote above from Matthew and Graham mirrors exactly my experience - when we do those things well, and are disciplined about it and trust each other the things work out well. When we do less of those things then things turn out less well.
Graham is Graham Klyne who I've met a few times at various meets like Vocamp 2008 in Oxford. He and his team are doing clever things with pictures of flies and semweb technologies.
Comments
Actually, I just scanned some of Damon's blog and googled him. Having read Why Damon Poole is Wrong I suspect I wouldn't be fussed about those links after all, so I've removed the link to Accurev. Here's a link to Subversion instead.
I was educated on Agile quite a bit by Damon Poole at Accurev. I thought you might be interested in his blog Agile Development Thoughts (I forget the exact URL), but you can easily find it. The tool is great for what you describe, allowing you autonomy to use the process and methodology you want without impacting other teams, as well as building trust by making sure what you are working on isn't prematurely put into the mix before it's time. We will integrate no code before it's time (or was that Paul Masson wine?) ;-) Mark
@Mark Thanks or dropping by. I've left the link in to accurev in case anyone's interested, but from your blurb I couldn't see anything that would tempt me away from Subversion. If you have a comparison document or explanation of how Accurev supports agile development better then I'd love you to post links. rob