Some agile principles come naturally. Others you have to work at.
Here are 3 agile principles I think require an extra level of care and attention. Perhaps they’d make good new year’s resolutions?
1. Work to fixed timescales
The end of a Sprint is the end of a Sprint. Not near the end. The end. Meeting fixed timescales means paying particular attention to the principle done means DONE! and managing code carefully. At the end of a Sprint, changes are either ‘DONE!’ or they are not. No checked-in code should be ‘work in progress’ at the end of a Sprint.
2. Focus on quality
Agile development requires confidence about quality at the end of every Sprint. That means strong (automated) unit testing and automated regression testing. Write your test cases up-front for each feature, as part of the requirements, not in parallel with development. Design your code to pass the tests. If you automate nothing else, automate the testing of key interfaces.
Agile development requires confidence about quality at the end of every Sprint. That means strong (automated) unit testing and automated regression testing. Write your test cases up-front for each feature, as part of the requirements, not in parallel with development. Design your code to pass the tests. If you automate nothing else, automate the testing of key interfaces.
3. Document appropriately
Agile documentation is barely sufficient. That’s barely sufficient. Not insufficient. Nor non-existent. Write requirements as ‘user stories’. Write a high-level architecture/design diagram for your solution. Write appropriate documentation for your feature to be re-used. Feature-by-feature, of course, not all up-front, nor all at the end.
Why not start the year as you mean to go on 🙂
Kelly.