Work Habits

Agile

• Manifesto
  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation.
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
  • Responding to change over following a plan.
• Deliver value frequently.
• Welcome change.
• Work closely with the business.
• Face to face communications.
• Keeping it simple not overdesign.
• Use the finest tools and technical practice to maximise productivity and robustness.
• Continual refinements to become more effective.
• Daily standup reporting what was done yesterday, what is planned to be done today, and a description of any current impediments.
• Code review before every checkin.
• Build by feature not by layer.
• Co-located teams.
  • Can hear problems in the background.
  • Increases communication.

• XP Practices within sprints / iterations:

  • Pair programming,
  • Test driven development,
  • Continuous integration
  • Automated builds
  • Simple design
  • Sustainable pace
  • Refactoring
  • Collective code ownership
  • Coding standards

• One of my favourite Agile videos: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/jeffries-running-tested-features

• A lot of projects fail because they spent too long building the wrong thing. Frequent releases to the customer and customer collaboration makes good financial sense, by not spending 6 months building the wrong thing and wasting budget.

Agile Tips

• Remember to include spikes as work units so they do not affect velocity.
• Keep technical debt visible and managed along side features and defects.
• Do not game numbers and only count stories that are done/done.

General

• Have progress visible, with burndown charts, and possibly feature status (1, 2) reporting for clients / the team. (cached)