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. Practical and focused, it offers proven and effective agile practices to make the reader a better developer. InfoQ.com brings you an excerpt, "Chapter 7: Agile Debugging," as a free pdf download.
Agile Software Development is gaining popularity. But, what does it mean to be agile? Is it using unit testing, continuous integration, following XP, Scrum? In this article Venkat Subramaniam discusses how to incrementally introduce agility into a project which is in trouble and not currently agile.
Fiddler is a free proxy that logs HTTP(S) traffic, allowing developers to inspect requests and responses, set breakpoints, and tamper with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler also includes an event-based scripting subsystem and can be extended using any .NET language. A simple but powerful example of Fiddler's utility can be seen when trying to get a complete view of a site's AJAX traffic.
VisualVM is an OpenJDK project from Sun to create an all-in-one troubleshooting tool for Java applications. The tool is a combination of several existing tools and newer profiling capabilities.
The Agile development community has been practicing Collective Code Ownership for long enough now that we had enough time to find some of the faults.
Ruby offers many ways of reducing code size. However, this can backfire in some situations. We look at one problem with Ruby's method for identifying nil and false values.
Spoxel.com, a document storage company successfully maintained all company services during Hawaii's recent earthquake. Among other factors, the company's leader credited their use of Ruby on Rails as part of their ability to stay up during the catastrophe.
James Shore, a recognized speaker and writer in the Agile space, has had a crazy idea: Get rid of your bug database. He's not advocating that teams ignore problems; but bug databases are often so packed with questions, feature requests, and defects that there's little hope of their all being resolved. Shore and some others in Extreme Programming circles think there's a better way.
"Highly resilient people are best suited for a world of constant change. They don't fight against disruptive change... they adjust to new situations quickly." Sounds useful for members of Agile teams which want to "embrace change", even more so for those experiencing the drastic change from traditional to Agile methods. Bob Weinstein's article lists some ways to increase your own resiliency.
