Pragmatic Agile
Presented at: Agile Development Conference 2005
Author: Paul King
Last Revised: November 2005
Synopsis
As Agile Development moves on from its honeymoon period and enters mainstream IT,
many gaps still exist in our knowledge of how to best use the theory and practices
espoused by many in the Agile community. This presentation aims to provide you with ideas
to help bridge these gaps. It attempts to give you insightful guidelines to use when
addressing typical problems that face many Agile projects. Some of the points discussed include:
| Agile Planning |
During early planning stages, an assessment must be made on whether to use an Agile, traditional or a hybrid approach. If an Agile or hybrid approach is adopted there are still decisions to be made about what Agile practices will be used throughout the project. These can be made project wide, on a per-release or per-story basis or for particular tasks within a story. Similarly, decisions can be made on what metrics and coding standards to apply for differents parts of the project.
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| Pair Programming |
Pair programming is a practice which usually produces higher-quality software with fewer defects but with implied higher development costs. How does an Agile project go about balancing the quality and cost drivers? |
| Emergent Design |
Emergent design allows decisions about design and architecture to be delayed until a time when more information is known and changes to requirements can be reflected in the decisions.
This provides enormous flexibility and eliminates wasting time on unneeded features which are thought useful up-front.
A weakness in the approach is that it doesn't help identify wide-ranging design and architecture decisions which, if determined up-front, may save numerous dead-ends and reduce unproductive steps. What signs should an Agile team look for to ensure they don't suffer the pitfalls of emergent design? |
| Refactoring |
Refactoring makes the code-base better but too much refactoring brings the team to a halt and has diminishing returns. What triggers can a team use to ensure that it is doing the right amount of refactoring. |
| Test-Driven Development |
Test-driven development uses test code to elaborate requirements. No production code is written unless a failing test exists. Surely then, the code will be fully-tested and the need for testers will be minimal. Well, actually there are many flaws in this thinking and many traps. We will discuss a few and examine how the Tester's role fits into the Agile team. Similar questions can be asked about how the Business Analyst's role fits into the emergent design practice? |
| Continuous Integration |
Continuous integration is a process which delivers working software in very short timeframes: minutes, hours, days.
However, projects don't work in isolation, in a typical large organisation, a blend of Agile and non-Agile projects will exist. How do Agile projects coordinate with non-Agile projects? |
| Other Factors |
Coding and documentation standards provide metrics so that Agile teams can avoid the pitfalls of the traditional unmaintainable code-bases of the past. But what happens if the metrics are made too extreme? What new problems might an Agile team face? How does a project team cope with publishing "honest" metrics in a world used to "bending" of the truth? What documentation approaches should they consider? |
| Agile Deployment |
What approach should Agile projects take towards deployment and release planning. Ideally Agile projects can deliver production-ready software on a near-daily basis. But the practicalities of interacting with non-Agile third parties, other projects or even customers means that careful iteration and release planning approaches are typically required. What can organisations do to make their deployment more agile? |
Our experiences have shown that various agile practices can be blended together to improve the longer-term quality and maintainability of your software, though usually at the cost of slow apparent early progress. The old saying "more haste, less speed" at work. Having said that, there are many things which can be done to make Agile very productive as well. We hope to give you some food for thought.
Throughout the talk, references are given to best-of-breed tools to assist we Agile development projects. A number of open source tools and Eclipse plugins are included within these references.
Slides: PDF
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Further Information
About the Author
Dr Paul King is Managing Director and Principal Consultant for ASERT.
His career spans technical and managerial roles in various organisations
underpinned by deep knowledge of the information technology & telecommunications
markets and a passion for the creation of innovative organisations.
Throughout his career, Dr King has provided technical and strategic
business consulting to hundreds of organizations throughout the U.S., Europe
and Asia Pacific. He is an expert, practitioner and trainer
in J2EE, XML and Web Services technologies.
He has numerous publications in National and International conferences, journals and trade magazines.
He has been awarded prizes for his research, publications and presentations and is a
frequent invited guest speaker at International Conferences.
He has also contributed to numerous international standards.
If you wish to contact the author, send an email to paulk at asert dot com dot au.
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