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Debate sprang up at JAOO '07 around Bob Martin's assertion that "nowadays it is irresponsible for a developer to ship a line of code he has not executed in a unit test." In this InfoQ video, he debated with Jim Coplien on this and other topics, including Design by Contract vs. TDD and how much up-front architecture is needed to keep a system consistent with the business domain model.
Joseph Pelrine has come full circle: from university studies in Psychology, journeying through SmallTalk, XP and Scrum, and now back to broader questions: Why and how does Agile work? In this interview, Joseph talked about Complexity Science, and how story-telling, "sense-making," network analysis and speed-dating's gut-feel approach may prove more useful than our old toolkits for managing teams.
After asserting that one must, as a rule, always version their database work, Scott Allen detailed an approach to making the best of versioning databases. Allen presented a comprehensive, practical approach to creating a baseline, using change scripts to manage schematic revisions, controlling programmatic database objects, and handling branching and merging.
Peter Ritchie raised concern about TDD and BDD keeping practitioners from writing good unit tests. He cites an over-reliance on “interaction testing", a core mantra and essence of TDD and BDD, as a driver with tendency to result in incomplete unit testing.
In an interview with InfoQ editor Kurt Christensen, Kent Beck shares his thoughts on a range of topics, from the challenges associated with adopting and applying agile values and practices within a large organization, to the future of agile as it gains mainstream acceptance.
It's easy to forget what originally motivated us, once we're implementing Agile. Teams spin, trying to figure out which practices to start with, unsure which will have the biggest impact, or how they fit together. Amr Elssamadisy and John Mufarrige propose a customized adoption approach to help teams decide where to focus first - an alternative to adoption of pre-packaged methodologies.
Agile adoption often proves challenging. Participants at a recent OpenSpace event focused on the dynamics of adoption rather than the structure that results from adoption. The resulting patterns are part of an effort to compile Agile adoption patterns answering: "What specific practices should I adopt?", "How can I adopt incrementally?" and "Where can I expect pitfalls?"
Kent Beck is interviewed at OOPSLA 2007 about his new book, "Implementation patterns", the relationship between these patterns and XP, problems when adopting agile and the current status of design patterns.
Ron Jeffries' upcoming book looks at how tracking "Running Tested Features" is the essential element of Agility, from which all other practices and activities necessarily follow. Deborah Hartmann interviews Ron who takes to the whiteboard to explain how, when supported by XP's "simple design" practice, RTF helps teams deliver consistently without building up costly technical debt.
For those getting started with Agile, this book offers a detailed first-person account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a distributed team of 40 people, and how they continuously improved their process over a year’s time.
