Feedback Fridays
Posted by Richard Sat, Jul 15 2006 22:55
Over the past several weeks, we have been meeting on Fridays with the application owners of our latest application. We mainly did this since we are under a tight timeline, but it was also a way to start working Agile Software Development into our environment. Some say you have to follow a process completely, but we haven't quite done that.
Agile To Us
We have adopted a few concepts (some agile concepts and some not). Some of those concepts include the following:
- Test Early Development or Test Driven Development (TDD)
- small team of developers (4)
- working from a list of features
- attempting to frequently commit back to the trunk
Note About Testing
We use Ruby on Rails. Since the framework has its own set of tests, we only test the functionality we have added to our application. For example if we create a validation on a model, we test that. We don't test the CRUD operations on the database because we assume those are tested with the framework. We currently write functional tests, but I have started using integration tests as well. These haven't taken off within our group, but maybe they will. They are much more like telling a story, but my initial impression is "functional" tests tend to work better for TDD (who knows, maybe I might change my mind once/if we start using integration tests more).
Feedback
We can add another agile step to our process. Frequent feedback from the application owners. The feedback has been in the form of our weekly Friday "demos" of the application. It is strange, but Friday has worked really well. The owners are very interested in the application and generally positive about the experience. We, as the developers, have spent all week adding features or fixing issues and we can now show them off. On top of that, we set our next set of features to work on and give the business owners some expectation of the progress on the application. Overall, a positive process for everyone involved.
Also let me say, I am glad we have support from management and that I have a great team to work with (thanks guys).
