Maintain Stability using XP

A dominant part of software development and maintenance is adding new or changed features to existing code. This means that the cost of software development and maintenance is in part determined by the maintainability and stability of the code. This is one of the messages the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship, as shown in Figure 15, is trying to bring across. Delivering well-crafted software is the only way to ensure that business value can be added at a steady, predictable, cost-efficient pace throughout the solution's lifecycle.

Figure 15: Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship

XP is a popular Agile method containing specialist practices for maintaining stability and working on quality. It's practices are inspired by widely used and proven ways of working, taking them to their extremes and leaving out all others that don't directly add value for the customer. In this section we will look at some of the XP practices that are directly concerned with delivering and maintaining quality and aren't addressed in Scrum, RUP or the Agile mindset in general.

Learn the Scrum Rules of Play

This is part 2 of 3 posts on Scrum. Part 1 of this post is Self-organize using Scrum.

The power of Scrum is that it is such a simple framework. To describe the Scrum process just 12 concepts suffice, divided as:

• 3 roles
• 4 work products
• 5 time-boxed events

Within a Scrum Team, Scrum recognizes three roles as depicted in Figure 13.

Figure 13: Scrum Roles

Self-organize using Scrum

This is part 1 of 3 posts on Scrum.

Scrum is a framework for self-organization of Agile teams. Although this seems a simple statement we are going to repeat it:

Scrum is a framework 

for self-organization 

of Agile teams

Let’s take a closer look at the three parts of this statement.