Agile Development Methods
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3 Questions for Easier, Less Stressful Project Estimates In agile development, the idea of precise estimates is unrealistic. But estimates are needed to inform decision-makers about whether it's worth solving a problem as it is currently understood. It sounds counterintuitive, but instead of asking for one estimate of cost and schedule, ask for three. Here's why it's more useful. |
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Fearless Refactoring, Not Reckless Refactoring Fearless refactoring is the agile concept that a developer should be able to incrementally change code without worrying about breaking it. But it's not believing that you don't need a safety net to detect and correct defects quickly when changes are made—that's just reckless. Here's how to avoid reckless refactoring. |
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Defensive Design Strategies to Prevent Flaky Tests Flaky tests could be the result of issues in the code, but more often they are due to assumptions in the test code that lead to non-relatable results. There are many reasons that tests can fail intermittently, and some can be easily avoided by applying good defensive design strategies. It's all about making your code agile. |
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Achieve Repeatable Builds with Continuous Integration Continuous integration is essential to provide the feedback needed to keep a team’s code agile. One crucial aspect to a successful CI process is a repeatable build. There are two parts to maintaining a repeatable build: the idioms and practices to define it, and the feedback cycle to maintain it. Here's what you need. |
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Driving Agile Change: A Slack Takeover with Mary Poppendieck Thought leaders from the software community are taking over the TechWell Hub to answer questions and engage in conversations. Writer, speaker, and author Mary Poppendieck hosted this Slack takeover and discussed all things agile, including how development has evolved over the decades and how to implement agile changes. |
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Reality-Driven Testing in Agile Projects Agile teams can drive down rework and devise more useful tests quicker by prioritizing reality-driven testing. This means tests based on reality, or relevant test activities above and beyond those derived from requirements. Learn some strategies to get real and design tests to locate important bugs that truly matter. |
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Is the Problem with Your Agile Tool, or How You’re Using It? While using index cards and a wall can function just fine as a kanban or Scrum board, issue-tracking tools such as Jira can make it easier to manage a backlog, especially with a distributed team. But these tools are more complex to use and can add their own overhead to the process. You need to keep things simple. |
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Selecting the Right Agile Framework There are many frameworks available to organizations that are maturing their agile process. However, some frameworks can help reinforce agile behaviors, while others can actually drive an organization to revert to waterfall habits. The right choice should be the methodology that allows teams to deliver their best work. |
