Question

There are numerous Agile software development methods. Which ones have you used in practice to deliver a successful project, and how did the method contribute to that success?

Answer 1

I’ve been involved with quite a few organisations which claimed to work in an ‘agile’ way, and their processed usually seemed to be base on XP (extreme programming), but none of them ever followed anywhere near all the practices.

That said, I can probably comment on a few of the XP practices

• Unit testing seems to prove very useful if it’s done from the start of a project, but it seems very difficult to come into an existing code-base and start trying to add unit tests. If you get the opportunity to start from scratch, test driven development is a real help.

• Continuous integration seems to be a really good thing (or rather, the lack of it is really bad). That said, the organisations I’ve seen have usually been so small as to make any other approach seem foolish.

• User story cards are nice in that it’s great to have a physical object to throw around for prioritisation, but they’re not nearly detailed enough unless your developer really knows the domain, or you’ve got an onsite customer (which I’ve never actually seen).

• Standup meetings tend to be really useful for new team members to get to know everyone, and what they work on. The old hands very quickly slack off, and just say things like ‘I’m still working on X’, which they’ve been doing for the past week – It takes a strong leader to force them to delve into details.

• Refactoring is now a really misused term, but when you’ve got sufficient unit tests, it’s really useful to conceptually separate the activity of ‘changing the design of the existing code without changing the functionality’ from ‘adding new functionality’