At our company, we the developers tried some methodologies to be more productive. One thing we could not try was Pair Programming. The reason is, that we are a small company and have only few programmers (and more non-programmers). So it would be impossible to explain to our boss, that two programmers sit at the same computer and solve t...
Would you recommend extreme programming practices implemented in organizations where team composition changes often? If in an extreme programming scenario, the team becomes volatile midway, what would you recommend? Thanks. ...
What type of client is likely to support XP (Extreme Programming) practices? ...
So standard Agile philosophy would recommend making your domain classes simple POCOs which are Persisted using a separate proxy layer via data access objects (like NHibernate does it). It also recommends getting as high unit test coverage as possible. Does it make any sense to write tests for these simple POCO objects? Say I have a c...
We user JIRA for bug tracking and release management and we have started using greenhopper for project management inside of JIRA but one thing that it lacks is the idea of user stories versus tasks in those users stories. Does anyone recommend other task board like agile project management tools that fully support users stories and task...
Hi, What are the basic steps for Agile software development? And how you start a new project with agile methodology? ...
If anyone is trying to do agile, i am trying to figure out a way to use JIRA / Greenhopper for this. We are a global dev team so the distributed nature is crucial here. We were initially using Scrumworks but the team complained that they had duplicate information in JIRA and scrumworks all the time and thought it was redundant. We got...
In your experience, what is the most effective time interval at which to change pairs in pair programming? Is it 90 minutes, 4 hours, a full day? ...
Hi I'm writing a small app for my friend's business, and thought I'd take the opportunity to brush up on some Agile Project Management training I did at the start of the year. I (and I think, my current organisation!) have always struggled with gathering requirements in the form of User Stories, which take the form: As a [User Type] I...
There's been lots of articles as of late declaring that Agile, Scrum or XP are "dead" or are "circling the drain". While I personally don't think agile development is dead, I wondered what others out there thought. Is agile dying, or are people just not following the practices and principles and thereby diluting what agile software devel...
Is it even sensible to try forming a scrum when one of the participants is in India (+05:30), and others are in the US (-06:00 and -08:00)? There isn't a comfortable meeting time for everyone with that. ...
Hi, Say we are creating Acme CMS. This CMS web application will allow you to create an unlimited number of categories with sub-categories (unlimited depth), and each category can have 0+ content pages associated with it. So this project, at a high level will have: Front End 1. index page 2. category page with list of content pages...
Currently we're using hand-rolled SQL in Data-Access objects and a lot of stored-procedures and triggers which amount to around 20k lines of code. We're finding that simple changes are causing a couple of days' work to fix, and its causing deadlines to slip. Changes include modifications to tables to cope with additional data, general r...
I'm on a team that uses scrum for our development process. We are currently trying to revamp certain aspects of our process to address some of the problems we've noticed lately. In doing so, we are exploring what it is that we like about the scrum process in general as well as what we don't like in order to help us identify what we as ...
I'm in a new contract where they seem to have gone overboard with Agile, including hiring a consultant merely for facilitating Agile processes. Something he is instituting is a notion of "core hours" where we will all actually be in the same room together. Is this really what "core hours" constitutes? I ask because it's highly inconve...
Hi, I'm starting up a personal project to develop some open source software. I want to use Scrum as the PM process on this (as I like the Product Backlog, prioritisation, and if I can get them, the burndowns) but it seems to me that I won't get the full value because I can't at the outset guarantee the amount of time myself and my col...
We're experimenting with following an agile approach to software development where I work. It's working well so far, however, towards the end of the iteration, we had a problem with a build and it cost a day's worth of time fixing: time that should have been dedicated to testing. As a result, our QA doesn't have enough time to complete...
There is the classic MSF Agile and MSF CMMI that are coming by default with VSTS. However, I saw that there is Scrum Light on CodePlex and a Scrum Process by Conchango. How good are those? Are you using any of those? What are your customization that you do? Are they taken as is? ...
We're usually 1-4 developers / art directors / copywriters on each project at my firm, what methodology would you recommend use to use? Agile? XP? Scrum? Something else? (I know they are all variations of essentially the same concept, yes) ...
For those agile practitioners out there... How do you manage changes to a database schema during a project? My assumption is that in an agile project the schema of any database involved will change and be refactored just as happens with the codebase. Is this assumption correct? If so, do you have any particular tools or processes that ...