super light software development process

Question

hi,

For the development process I have involved so far, most have teams of SINGLE member, or occasionally two.

We used python + django for the major development, the development process is actually very fast, and we do have code reviews, design pattern discussions, and constant refactoring.

Though team size is small, I do think there are some development processes / best practices that could be enforced. For example, using svn would be definitely better than regular copy backup.

I did read some articles & books about Agile, XP & continuous integration, I think they are nice, but still too heavy for this case (team of 1 or 2, and fast coding). For example, IMHO, with nice design pattern, and iterative development + refactoring, the TDD MIGHT be an overkill, or at least the overhead does not out-weight the advantages. And so is the pair programming. The automated testing is a nice idea, but it seems not technically feasible for every project.

our current practices are:

svn + milestone + code review

I wonder if there are development processes / best practices specifically targeted on such super light teams?

thanks.

Answer 1

You want to have both source control, so you can undo changes you now regret, and some sort of connection of changesets to stories or work items or requests or whatever you call them in your workflow. Over time this will let you answer why you made a particular change to code, or explore the code changes that were required by a particular decision. Explorations like this will help you to make better decisions in the future. You probably also need to manage your backlog / todo list / customer requests / brilliant ideas and if that connects directly into your source control, so much the better.