Agile Methodology and Techniques

JJ People are avid users of Agile techniques and methodologies for the development of their software. As a good proportion of our software development is performed using distributed teams of developers we have grown to appreciate a number of simple agile rules that make for effective collaborative software development. These are namely:

• Provide context in all documentation starting with high level context moving down into context for the tasks themselves.
• Make all tasks atomic. If a task is going to take more than 2 hours it probably needs splitting into more tasks. Atomic tasks allow for faster feedback. Atomic tasks also allow any deviation between expected and actual to be nipped in the bud.
• Work closely with business providing continuous feedback on the software development and continuous clarification of evolving business requirements.
• Provide continuous test driven development so that technical issues can be identified as soon as they occur. This guards against regression of the code base and encourages the re-factorisation of code to improve: re-usability; readability; and maintainability of the code base.

A number of methodologies help us satisfy the above rules. They are namely:

• Feature driven development
• Test driven development
• Collaborative development (including extreme pair programming where in order)
• Ego driven development (Putting down someone's code on the basis of certain criteria and having them defend it)
• Scrum development
• Rapid Application development

A number of agile tools help us satisfy the above rules and use the above methodologies. They are namely:

• Code Monitor - Code Monitor is an open source software management tool conceptualised to aid the coordination of distributed and collaborative development spread across multiple geographical locations and time zones. Code Monitor is unique in its ability to classify all changes to the code base and link them to the various steps of the software development life cycle. This makes for accountable and transparent software development.
• Cruise Control - Cruise Control is a Continuous Integration server which can be set up to trigger a testing sequence every time the code base changes.
• jUnit - useful for setting up the unit tests that Cruise Control triggers every time the code base changes.
• ANT or Maven - useful for creating platform independent customised build, packaging and deployment scripts. ANT is particularly attractive in the fact that it can be easily integrated into nearly every single IDE that exists as well as being easily integratable into Continuous Integration servers such as Cruise Control. ANT or Maven provide for an independent build process that can establish whether the reason an application is failing to run as expected with a rapid application tool is because of an incorrectly configured environment as opposed to code problems. ANT is especially useful when it comes to integration, deployment and testing. Often RAD tools are not suitable for build, packaging and deployment of applications to Integration and Test servers.
• Eclipse or Netbeans - useful for rapid application development. Especially great are their ability to rapidly re-factor the code base.
• Fitnesse - useful for Continuous User Acceptance Testing. Once fixtures have been written the business can test different data scenarios against their use cases and code via a web interface.