Software Developer

Agile has not only gone mainstream, it’s gone global. Data on agile team performance, time-to-market, and quality have emerged in the past decade. In 2012, a group of Columbus, Ohio, companies—business, IT, and financial services firms—participated in the first ever “Columbus Agile vs. the World” study. They collected velocity, schedule, effort, staffing, and quality data which were compared against QSM’s Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) database. Analysis revealed delivery was 31 percent faster with 75 percent fewer defects than industry norms. Enter Munich, Germany.

To accomplish anything, you need the help of others. Successful teams are composed of members who are continually improving how they interact and communicate. Collaboration, creativity, and results grow out of an environment that is honest, positive, and affirming. Improvisation is about creating a positive environment where actors take an idea and then collaborate to co-create another great idea. In today’s world, a superstar does not sit in his office and emerge with a great idea. Great ideas evolve through group interaction.

The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging conundrum. Too much design often results in excess complexity and wasted effort. Too little design results in a poor architecture or insufficient system structures which require expensive rework and hurt more in the long run. How can we know the right balance of upfront design work and emerging design approaches? Al Shalloway shows how to use design patterns—coupled with agile’s attitude of “don’t build what you don’t need”—to guide your design efforts.

“We could not test this because…” Every technology professional has experienced issues during system testing when unit testing was overlooked or cut short. Every project team has hit roadblocks during system testing when dependent systems or complicated data have been unavailable. Service virtualization is a tool that eliminates the waiting and the excuses, making thorough and complete unit and system testing realistic. Done well, service virtualization improves defect detection and resolution in every phase of a project—driving down cost while improving quality.

Technical debt happens, either via strategic decisions or inadvertantly as a project progresses. Debt can slow down a project and represents a risk that is not always apparent to those outside the project. Teams must find ways to work technical debt resolution activities into sprints and get agreement from external management to reduce it. David Croley explores the sources and types of technical debt and discusses the costs associated with ignoring it. David discusses techniques for making technical debt visible and quantifiable, and shows how to reduce it in an agile fashion.