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Art of Agile Development - Practicing

 
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As I said in my last post, Shane and I divided our book up into three parts: Getting Started, Practicing XP, and Mastering Agility. I thought that having a topic on each of these subjects might generate some interesting conversations. I'll be following the other threads and responding to them as well.

"Practicing XP" is the second part of our book. Here, we dive deep into a single agile method (Extreme Programming) and share all of the wisdom and practical tips we could muster. It's a lot of ground to cover, which makes this the biggest part of the book. It doubles as a reference, and judging by the traffic the review website got, I think this is the part of the book that readers will keep turning back to.

This is the pragmatic, detailed, "how to" part of the book. There are a couple of things that we did that I particularly liked. First, we wrote the book for the whole team--programmers, yes, but also customers and testers--so each practice starts with a description of who we're writing for with each practice. Then, towards the end of each practice, we talk about when the practice isn't appropriate and alternatives you can use.

We divided the practices into five chapters. Although the book focused on XP, I'd be happy to talk about any agile method here.

  • Thinking: pair programming, energized work, informative workspace, root-cause analysis, retrospectives
  • Collaborating: trust, sit together, real customer involvement, ubiquitous language, stand-up meetings, coding standards, iteration demo
  • Releasing: "done done", no bugs, version control, ten-minute build, continuous integration, collective code ownership, documentation
  • Planning: vision, release planning, the planning game, risk management, iteration planning, slack, stories, estimating
  • Developing: incremental requirements, customer tests, test-driven development, refactoring, simple design, incremental design and architecture, spike solutions, performance optimization, exploratory testing


  • [ October 30, 2007: Message edited by: James Shore ]
     
    Greenhorn
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    Hi James
    thanks for your time.

    I like the concept of post-release documents to enable future work (source your article "Two Kinds of Documentation")... it is for me, when I started reading/looking/hooking into XMP/agile, the missing link.

    Do you explode further the concept in your book? Which information/structure/guidelines? How to preserve legacy across releases and teams?

    I guess the tricky bit is how much time/effort would be allocated. Typically when a project is delivered 5 more are ready to start, and it's so tempting (developers you know) to start on a new ground with new challenges and a lot more to learn.

    Regards,
    Beppe
     
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    Jim,

    It's really very great to see your posts and your responses.
    Could you please list out some best practices to follow while using agile model.

    Regards
    Vinayagam
     
    Vinayagam Kulandaivel
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    I have found the answer some what here The Seven Core Practices of Agile Work from Agile advice.

    Thanks & Regards
    Vinayagam
     
    James Shore
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    Hi Beppe,

    We go into a bit more detail about documentation, although my "Two Kinds of Documentation" essay was the inspiration for the material. Scheduling time for documentation should be done with stories, as with any other customer-valued work.

    Vinayagam,

    "Best practices" is a misleading term--there are no practices that are truly "best" in every situation. Our book has a collection of darned good practices that have been proven to work well together on real projects, and will probably work well for you in the right situation. I happen to know that explaining the practices in detail would take 400 pages, so I'll stop here.
     
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    Originally posted by Beppe Catanese:

    I like the concept of post-release documents to enable future work (source your article "Two Kinds of Documentation")... it is for me, when I started reading/looking/hooking into XMP/agile, the missing link.



    Well, taking over a project that has near to 100% coverage for both acceptance and unit tests would already be a big improvement in comparison to any other project I had to take over yet...
     
    Vinayagam Kulandaivel
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    Jim,

    Thanks for your time.

    To be frank, Agile/XP makes more dependencies and requires a gentle agreement with all levels of people involved in Agile/XP projects. Also need to consider about attrition in all levels, It may affects the delivery.
    But finally it assures a better and quality delivery as far as my knowledge it's better to implement agile slowley by module by module. So that every one will get knowledge and over the period will be expert.

    Best Regards
    Vinayagam
     
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    So that every one will get knowledge and over the period will be expert.


    What do you mean by this ?
     
    Vinayagam Kulandaivel
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    Hi Christophe,

    Onece the people started using agile programing, they will become a expert over the period. I hope there is nothing complicate in my quote?

    Regards
    Vinayagam
     
    Christophe Verré
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    Oh sorry, I got mixed up. I thought you were talking about modules of a project. I guess that they may get a good grasp of Agile if there's already an expert (like James!) in the team. Otherwise, they might think that they're doing it right, although they are not.
     
    Vinayagam Kulandaivel
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    Yes, Jim will be the role model for every one here

    Regards
    Vinayagam
     
    Don't get me started about those stupid light bulbs.
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