InfoQ

News

InfoQ Video: Practices of an Agile Developer

Posted by Deborah Hartmann on Mar 31, 2008 07:53 PM

Community
Agile
Topics
Customers & Requirements,
Agile Techniques,
Debugging
Tags
Coaching and Mentoring,
No Fluff Just Stuff Symposiums,
Complementary Practices,
Interpersonal Communication
At "No FLuff Just Stuff" Venkat Subramaniam, co-author with Andy Hunt of the book "Practices of an Agile Developer," shared his pragmatic approach to some of the important technical and non-technical factors contributing to project success, including: coding, developer attitude, debugging, mentoring and feedback. InfoQ has captured Venkat's presentation, "Practices of an Agile Developer," on video.

Venkat describes their approach as consisting of "Practices and Balance:"
  • We’ll start with often convincing, but troubling, thoughts...
     
  • We’ll discuss good practices, recommendations, dos and don’ts, and
     
  • We'll summarize our advice for the practice, then
     
  • Tell you "what it feels like" when you're doing it right, and
     
  • Tell you how to keep your balance.
In this presentation, as in their book, each point starts with the voice of both the "angel" and the "devil" in each of us, for example:


 
The "what it feels like" section is unusual, and welcome. For example:



 The video covers these topics, just a sampling of the 45 practices included in the book:
  • Beginning Agility:
    • Work for Outcome
    • Criticise Ideas, not People
  • Feeding Agility:
    • Keep Up With Change
    • Invest in Your Team
    • Feel the Rhythm
  • Delivering What Users Want:
    • Let Customers Make Decisions
    • Let Design Guide, Not Dictate
    • Fixed Prices are Broken Promises
  • Agile Feedback:
    • Different Makes a Difference
  • Agile Debugging:
    • Attack Problems in Isolation
  • Agile Collaboration:
    • Schedule Regular Face Time
    • Be a Mentor
Venkat and Andy created the book to help developers incrementally grow their skillsets while tackling real problems in their everyday work. In our 2007 interview, Venkat had this to say on the topic of continuous, ongoing education:
I think it is important that we all spend time; if you are a person who is interested in a 9 to 5 job, I recommend that you have a career switch. Software development is not a field where you can just go to work; we are a professional community; it requires a great deal of effort and agility to keep up with it. So get on the treadmill and march along and that's the only way to succeed.

Related Sponsor

VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.

3 comments

Reply

Great presentation on Agile programming by Pawan Kumar Posted Apr 1, 2008 4:24 AM
I'm converted :) by João Vieira da Luz Posted Apr 4, 2008 6:57 PM
Very good talk by Marcos Oliveira Posted Apr 8, 2008 10:04 AM
  1. Back to top

    Great presentation on Agile programming

    Apr 1, 2008 4:24 AM by Pawan Kumar

    Venkat, I really enjoyed your presentation and most of the things said in the presentation. It will help me a lot in changing the way I am working right now and also my team members. Thanks Pawan

  2. Back to top

    I'm converted :)

    Apr 4, 2008 6:57 PM by João Vieira da Luz

    Nice talk in an agile style. Trying to keep the feedback loop short. It's very clear Agile in Venkat words. Thanks for talk João

  3. Back to top

    Very good talk

    Apr 8, 2008 10:04 AM by Marcos Oliveira

    Venkat, this is the best talk I've seen on how to make a team work. Thank you very much.

Exclusive Content

Typemock: Past, Present and Future

Eli Lopian of Typemock answers a few questions on Typemock origins and where Typemock is headed.

Agile in Practice: What Is Actually Going On Out There?

Scott Ambler talks about actual data resulting from surveys made during 2006-2008, showing how Agile is perceived and implemented within organizations.

Building Smart Windows Applications

From QCon 2008, Daniel Moth presents on using Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 to create compelling rich Windows applications.

Joshua Kerievsky about Industrial XP

Joshua Kerievsky, founder of Industrial Logic, talks about Industrial Extreme Programming which extends XP by including practices dealing with management, customers and developers.

Jeff Barr Discusses Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Evangelist Jeff Barr discusses SimpleDB, S3, EC2, SQS, cloud computing, how different Amazon services interact, origins of AWS, AWS globalization and the March AWS outage.

More Than Just Spin (Up) : Virtualization for the Enterprise and SaaS

Cloud services have helped bring virtualization to the forefront. Its full power however, also includes other benefits such as high availability, disaster recovery, and rapid provisioning.

Ruby Beyond Rails

John Lam talks about his path to dynamic languages, some of the problems of making IronRuby run fast, and how the DLR helps with implementing languages.

VMware Infrastructure 3 Book Excerpt and Author Interview

VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide provides a wealth of practical insights into setting up virtualization in todays corporate environments.