Book Excerpt: Practices of an Agile Developer

Posted by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt on Jul 24, 2006 05:41 PM

Community

Agile

Topics

Teamwork ,

Agile Techniques ,

Leadership

Tags

Continuous Improvement ,

Testing ,

Troubleshooting

InfoQ.com offers one chapter of Practices of An Agile Developer in a free pdf excerpt, an example of what you will find in this useful book:

Chapter 7: Agile Debugging

 

Even on the most talented agile projects, things will go wrong. Bugs,
errors, defects, mistakes—whatever you want to call them, they will
happen.

The real problem with debugging is that it is not amenable to a time
box. You can time box a design meeting and decide to go with the best
idea at the end of some fixed time. But with a debugging session, an
hour, a day, or a week may come and go and find you no closer to
finding and fixing the problem.

You really can’t afford that sort of open-ended exposure on a project.
So, we have some techniques that might help, from keeping track of
previous solutions to providing more helpful clues in the event of a
problem.

[ Read the whole chapter ]

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From the publisher:

Want to be a better developer? This book collects the personal habits, ideas, and approaches of successful agile software developers and presents them in a series of short, easy-to-digest tips. This isn't academic fluff; follow these ideas and you'll show yourself, your teammates, and your managers real results. These are the proven and effective agile practices that will make you a better developer.

This book will help you improve five areas of your career:

• The Development Process
• What to Do While Coding
• Developer Attitudes
• Project and Team Management
• Iterative and Incremental Learning

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About the authors

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored more than 3000 software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and India. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at conferences. He is also an adjunct faculty at the University of Houston (where he received the 2004 CS department teaching excellence award) and teaches the professional software developer series at Rice University School of continuing studies. He is author of ".NET Gotchas" .

Andy Hunt is well known as a programmer, author, and publisher. He has co-authored five books including The Pragmatic Programmer, as well as numerous articles, and was one of the 17 founders of the Agile Alliance.

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