Agile

Importance of Scrum based stand-ups in traditional IT projects!

ShriKant Vashishtha · May 12, 2008 · Leave a Comment

As discussed in my earlier JavaWorld article Agility meets the waterfall, there are various practices in Agile world which can be used in traditional projects also.

One of the best practice I came to know is the practice of stand-ups in Scrum based Agile project. A stand-up is all about having a 10-20 minutes meeting with all the team members of a Scrum team. In this meeting each member talks about what he did in the last day, what he’s supposed to do today and if there any impediments in his working. No detailed discussions are allowed in this meeting . In case you require them, they can be taken offline with the concerned stake-holders. However in this meeting you can discuss the need of that offline discussion.
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Agile way of documentation!!!

ShriKant Vashishtha · May 5, 2008 · Leave a Comment

As you enter into Agile world, a statement welcomes you – “Just do enough documentation”. For quite sometime, I was puzzled what we really mean by this. In my view “just-enough” is very ambiguous or abstract. You cannot quantify it. For some who are working for a development project, creating documentation may not make much sense as you can find people just across your table to answer your question and you can get away by doing “not just-enough documentation” (no java-docs, no project overview etc). However when you come in maintenance cycle of the project, it just sucks. Maintenance may implicitly means new people, a long project cycle and people who leave the project or even organization itself.

What do you do then? People who were in the project at the beginning may not be there anymore, either from customer side or from software developers side. Without having a knowledge repository, new people will try to reinvent the wheel, will go through the code (white box, which ideally should be a black box most of the times) or will look like people who enter in a dark tunnel without having clue on what they are supposed to do.

TDD without Strategic Design – Mess?

ShriKant Vashishtha · May 1, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Sometimes back there was an interesting debate between Agile manifesto founder member Bob Martin and renowned Jim Coplien about the relevance of good design principles in TDD based development.

Jim had very thought provoking views about what people do in the name of TDD and when it leads to something where it’s just impossible to do any kind of refactoring further as there was no overall sound design/architecture base.

It leads to following questions:

While practicing TDD and Scrum, is it really possible to focus on a good design considering we just focus on the prioritized list of requirements and don’t really see their interactions with other user stories to begin with?
Without having a big picture in shape of logical diagram, class diagrams (read UML), deployment diagrams, is it really possible to create a good architecture/design? May be it’s possible in small scale projects where the level of complexity in terms of business logic is not too high. But the question is more relevant for big projects (1-2 million LOC).

There were some interesting follow up in this respect from various people in Xebia. I thought it’ll be a good idea to combine all those thoughts through this blog.