Agile software development related people

AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT RELATED PEOPLE SOFTWARE
AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT RELATED PEOPLE SERIES

Software development is not an exact science and many factors, such as context, the organisation and the problem will dictate how development proceeds. By learning a set of techniques and a process to apply them, and by discussing possible alternatives you will be in a better position to make these decisions. This is often what happens in practice and many development processes get adapted rather than used as mandated. The term agile can be found now in many contexts, and it is interesting to see, for example, a report from a UK government agency, the National Audit Office, on Governance for Agile Delivery (National Audit Office, 2012).ДЄn agile approach requires experience to be able to pick, choose and adapt the elements of a development process that best suit a real situation. Several agile practices have been recognised and incorporated in other more prescriptive development processes, in particular the emphasis on people as opposed to process, short iterations and the acceptance that systems change. Many of the agile practices are geared to better communication and collaboration among developers. the daily scrum вЂ“ a daily meeting, no longer than 15 minutes, looking at what has been done and planning the work for the next 24 hours.the sprint planning meeting вЂ“ lasts no more than eight hours.the sprint вЂ“ a development phase, no longer than a month, that has as a deliverable a useable working increment.All events are timeboxed and have well-defined rules вЂ“ scrum events comprise: Scrum (Schwaber and Sutherland, 2011), which is also a popular agile approach, defines a set of roles, events, artefacts and rules. These practices include incremental design, test-first programming, programming in pairs, continuous integration, planning for the week, and so on.

It defines a series of practices about how individuals and teams should work, how the environment should be set up, and how the work should be carried out. It is a light-weight method, based on intensive testing and incremental development.

It is however accepted that some old practices of software development sometimes lead to problems and agile practices, although not a panacea, may bring better ways of working.Д®xtreme programming (XP) (Beck,В 2004) is one of the best-known agile methods. The agile movement also has its deprecators and critiques, one of them being that agile methods do not scale up to larger systems. The emphasis on the people involved in the development is also common to all agile approaches and is the basis of the sense of fun, motivation and productivity usually associated with it. However what the agile approach does is to promote the implementation of those practices with well-defined rules. Iterative and incremental development, for example, has been promoted for a long time in the short history of software development and adopts some of these practices. In 2001, leading proponents of the agile approach got together and wrote a manifesto (Figure 7).ДЄgile practices of simpler, lighter-weight, faster and nimbler software development that can adapt to change are best practices that are not new. Many of its proponents were associated, throughout the 1990s, with several approaches known as light-weight in opposition to more prescriptive approaches to software development. The movement towards a more agile way of developing software has been gathering momentum for a long time. The continual realignment of development goals with the needs and expectations of the customer aims at software that better serves its purpose.ДЄs seen below in the manifesto, agile development is an approach to software development that puts people and working software at the forefront of the development process. It is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of (agile) methods that promote a set of practices that encourage simpler, more light-weight, faster and nimbler software development that can adapt to the inevitable changes in customer requirements. Agile development has become, in the last 20 years, a popular approach to software development.

AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT RELATED PEOPLE SERIES

AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT RELATED PEOPLE SOFTWARE

Agile software development related people