Process

Articles

Common branching patterns Branching to Distraction

Branching can be an effective solution for managing change, enabling parallel development and improved productivity. But, working on a branch is a distraction and can decrease agility, productivity, and code robustness. Learn when the value of working on a branch outweighs the cost.

Steve Berczuk's picture Steve Berczuk
flow chart Four Agile Tips to Eliminate Rework in Application Development

Your applications need to meet business needs, overcome complex processes, and provide instant results to customers. And, ideally, they’ll require minimal rework on your part. The first step to success is requirements definition. Here, Filip Szymanski offers some tips from agile methods that will improve your requirements—even if you haven’t otherwise adopted agile.

Filip Szymanski's picture Filip Szymanski
Personality Factors That Influence Core Build and Release Management Practices

Leslie Sachs discusses the key people skills essential to appreciating how and which personality factors most impact one's ability to successfully implement core build and release management practices.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Getting Empirical about Refactoring

Often when we refactor, we look at local areas of code. If we take a wider view, using information from our version control systems, we can get a better sense of the effects of our refactoring efforts.

Michael Feathers's picture Michael Feathers
Agile vs. Waterfall: The Blue Ocean Explains Why Agile Wins

The Blue Ocean Strategy gives important insights regarding how to create new market space in uncontested markets thereby making the competition irrelevant. This strategy can be adopted to explain the significance of agile methodologies as compared to the Waterfall method of software development.

Badri N. Srinivasan's picture Badri N. Srinivasan
Using Lean-Agile to Provide the Real Value of ALM

If Agile is going to make a difference to an organization, it must accomplish two things. First, it must assist us in being driven by business needs—not the development organization. Second, it must help us with the entire value stream—not merely part of it. Lean-agile practices presents us with an opportunity to reunite the business and software development organizations so our Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) can focus on value, not merely delivered software.

Al Shalloway's picture Al Shalloway
Agile ALM—Opposites Attract

Agile and ALM are two terms that you don’t often see side by side. To most developers, agile means team interaction, customer collaboration, dynamism, and responsiveness to change. In contrast, ALM seems to imply the opposite of agile, with echoes of rigid procedures, inflexibility, and top-down process control. But are the agile and ALM approaches as contradictory as they first appear to be?

Mike Shepard
Exploring the Subtle Differences Between Agile Paradigms

In recent years within the object oriented and agile community, several approaches to software design and development have materialized and are in use by professional software developers. Test-Driven Development (TDD), Domain-Driven Design (DDD), Behavior-Driven Design (BDD) and Feature-Driven Design (FDD) are some of the more well known approaches. While these philosophies all imbibe the classic agile principles of an incremental and iterative mindset to software development, they subtly differ from each other.

Nirav Assar's picture Nirav Assar
The Marriage of Lean, Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP)

Many flavors of Agile have emerged: Scrum, Lean, Feature Driven Development (FDD), and Extreme Programming just to name a few. These methods have numerous complementary and distinguishing features, but the gamut of choices can be confusing and disorienting - as if being told to choose the best from 31 flavors of ice cream. Return on Investment (ROI) is important to me, so Lean must be the answer. But wait, I also want to be agile with my business priorities so I’ll choose Scrum. We are left wanting a simple question answered: “Which Agile method should I choose for my organization?”

Geoffrey Bourne's picture Geoffrey Bourne
Agile Developer’s Journal: A Day in the Life

People are creatures of habit, particularly programmers: We seek consistency, whether it is the tried-and-true waterfall/SDLC method or our morning routine of reading the newspaper with a hot cup of coffee. Companies or projects looking to adopt an agile process neglect the fundamental concern of an individual developer: "What will my day to day look like working in an agile environment?"

Geoffrey Bourne's picture Geoffrey Bourne

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