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.

The Agile Spirit

All Agile methods are guided by the Agile Manifesto and the Agile Principles. The Agile Manifesto takes 8 aspects of software development and compares the focus they should receive. A way to check if the Agile spirit is present is to bring a development team, management and stakeholders together. Write these 8 aspects on sticky notes as shown in Figure 5 and randomly put them on a flip-over or whiteboard. Then have every participant divide 5 marks over these aspects, reflecting his personal sense of value of these aspects in reaching the project goal (a happy customer). You can try this exercise for yourself. Which 5 aspects have you marked?

Figure 5: Agile Values Exercise

ScrumUP Fairytale - Part 3

The Soup Stone – 3: An empty square…

The people all look tired and skinny. The houses are decaying and the farmland looks bare although there are crops growing on it. There seems to be a lot of poverty in this curious place.

Comparing Methods

Up till now we have discussed two Agile methods (Scrum and XP) and RUP as an iterative but more process oriented method. In this section we will compare these methods and investigate how they could enhance each other.

Introducing Agile

In the mid 1990’s, as a reaction to heavyweight waterfall based processes, some other methods emerged. Good examples of these methods are DSDM, RAD, Crystal, XP and Scrum. Not that the people behind them were against process. They just strived to free themselves of Dilbert-like manifestations of process in corporate life, of people hiding behind pointless regulations, managers disrupting the working environment and enforcing unfounded plans and teams producing hundreds of pages of documentation that were impossible to maintain and hardly ever used. They strived for cooperation instead of throwing the result of hard work over a cubicle wall without a proper transfer session and without a clue of what the person on the other side of that wall would be going to do with it.