Agile Strategies for Traditional Software Development Teams

Many development and test teams are still working on more traditional software projects that release every few months or longer, rather than daily or weekly. Benefits of adopting continuous development strategies into a standard software cycle include immediate feedback on code changes, a clear understanding of the current risk-state of the software, and current and historical data to assess progress. Melanie Drake shares specific “modern” strategies that her development team has added and how these strategies enhance software quality. Some tools include continuous integration to catch build errors; continuous test runs with baseline tests to catch egregious errors; automated tests to free testers to spend more time testing purposefully; and developer-contributed changelist-level tools, which help narrow found problems to specific changes. Processes and tools evolve over time, and you don't have to adopt all strategies at once. Melanie shows how you can adopt strategies piecemeal, as they fit best for your team and your product. In the end, your processes serve you and your product—not the other way around.