Shaking Things Up

We talk a lot about our experiences in this column about our agile software development practice...so much so, that perhaps it sounds a little self-serving at times. After all, we're heavily invested in agile methodology. So here's a link to another developer's (Russ Nemhauser's) blog...a developer who joined an agile team at a Large Software Company Somewhere in the State of Washington. His background was in BUFD (big up-front design) and he therefore approached this Scrum project (in .NET) with a great deal of skepticism. Read about his conversion here. He also gives an example of test-driven development and talks about why he's now a believer...so much so that he's uncomfortable writing code before he writes the test(s)....and how (at least in this example) it was a time saver. (YMMV, of course.)

An interesting idea:

This doesn't solve the problem of some clients requiring large functional specification documents, but it does offer at least one potential change to the way they're written: the functional specification can be written AFTER the majority of functionality has been developed and delivered. This is a huge step toward an accurate specification and it also drastically reduces the amount of time it takes to write the document.