Martin Fowler defined refactoring as a ” disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior”. In the days of Agile development where code is delivered after one or two-week cycles, you start quickly to deal with “legacy” code, what was known as “maintenance” for projects that had longer delivery time frames.
Without good agile engineering practices in place, a Scrum team’s ability to continue to be productive degrades over time. This presentation explores the difference between a change of “direction of speed” versus true agility, and why agile engineering practices are essential to achieve agility.
XP (eXtreme Programming) Engineering Practices such as Continuous Integration, User Stories, Pair Programming and Test Driven Development can mean the difference for a Scrum team between saying that you’re agile and actually being able to be competitive in the market and maintain high quality and confidence in your code.
Pair Programming is probably considered to be the most extreme ‘Extreme Programming’ practice, and a powerful technique for unlocking learning in a software development team. This video looks at this cultural practice that supports our ability to create better software faster in continuous delivery and DevOps teams.
If today many people equal Agile with Scrum, the Agile approach is also deeply rooted in software engineering practices, like pair programming or refactoring, promoted by the eXtreme Programming (XP) movement. In this book, Emily Bache presents the Samman Technical Coaching approach. It is a method for helping software development teams to become more agile and raise the quality of their work.
Modern software development inspired by Agile approaches welcomes changing requirements, even late in the process, but how can we write our software so that those changes don’t create a mess? Evolutionary design is the key.
The concept of team is at the heart of Agile software development and frameworks like Scrum. Forming high performance Agile teams is however not obvious. In this article, Debbie Madden suggests five steps that could bring your software development teams beyond the basic principles of Agile.
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