What is agile?

Yeah, but what is it really?

• Philosophy
• Practices
• Processes
• A cultural movement?

A brief history lesson

History is a lie

• "Waterfall" has never been proposed as a viable software methodology
• Reference:
  http://www.idinews.com/waterfall.html

Defining features (that people usually agree on)

• Iterative and incremental
• Quick turnover
• Light on documentation

So what is agile good for?

• Your resume?
• Changing requirements
• Delivering software on time
• Your project?

Agile Practices

• Practices today, processes later on
• We will focus on the ones you will find most helpful in your project

Standups

• Frequent (often daily) short progress update meetings
• Traditionally, everyone stands up
• Answer 3 key questions
  • What did I do?
  • What problems did I face?
  • What am I going to do?

Asynchronous Stand-ups

• A somewhat controversial topic
• Advantages
  • No need to find a suitable time for everyone
  • May work better for big teams
• Disadvantages
  • "Blockers" take longer to be addressed
  • Easy to forget to give an update
  • Less personal
  • Updates from others can be missed

Sprints/iterations

• Time is fixed, scope is flexible
• Plan only for the next sprint
• Typically have a release at the end of each sprint

Task Boards

Taskboards

• Available in GitLab
• Use them to store and track your progress on user stories
• You don't need many columns. E.g.
  • Backlog
  • Todo
  • Doing
  • Testing?
  • Closed/Done

Pair programming

• Two programmers, one computer, one keyboard
• Take it in turns to write code, but discuss it as they go
• Can result in better code quality
• Good for helping less experienced programmers learn micro-techniques from more experienced programmers

Test-Driven-Development (TDD)

• Writing tests before the implementation
• Write only enough code to make the next test pass
• Takes some practice
• We'll come back to this next week

Meeting Minutes

• For more formal meetings (e.g. weekly meetings) it's quite common to take minutes of the meeting.
• Meeting minutes will typically consist of documenting:
  • Attendees
  • (Optional) Agenda
  • Discussion Points
  • Actions