Essential Agile Engineering Practices: TDD, Pairing, and Continuous Integration

Organizations are often reluctant to adopt the more challenging agile engineering practices, first described in Extreme Programming, and now adopted by the Scrum Alliance as the “Scrum Developer Practices.” They're difficult to implement and sustain, and the benefits are often vague, subtle, and measurable only after months of disciplined effort. Rob Myers describes two techniques that help evaluate the impact of any change to the organizational system―lean's value-stream mapping and the theory of constraints' five focusing steps. Rob describes the most common agile engineering practices from the standpoint of how they provide a return on investment including their costs, and how they often work in tandem to multiply the effect. He draws extensively from his hands-on experience with these practices and shares data from well-established sources. After briefly discussing TDD, pair programming, and continuous integration, Rob evaluates practices that the delegates choose.