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Why You Need to Be Specific about Agile Practice Adoption Amr Elssamadisy presents one way to share our knowledge that is more specific than full methodologies and processes, more general than war stories, and will help new agile adopters get beyond the mantra "It depends!"
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The Whole Product It's easy to split user-experience experts and software architects into different categories and still grant them equal importance; the former deals with the façade of the software while the latter deals with the workings beneath the surface. This separate, but equal attitude changed for Jeff Patton after attending a workshop in which his eyes opened to an epiphany of holism in software development. From this enlightened moment, Jeff realized a way software development could change for the better.
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Write a Blockbuster Using User Scenarios Big projects require many little user stories. But if these scenarios don't add up to one good story, then you're probably missing out on the big picture. In this week's column, Jeff Patton describes how his team weaves many small tales into a single strong report by identifying key characters and themes.
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Feature-Driven Development: An Agile Alternative to Extreme Programming Feature-driven development (FDD) has the more traditional progression of a systems-engineering life cycle mode as compared to agile methods. It uses distinct phases in its iterations while still being highly iterative and collaborative. FDD does conduct up-front planning, design and documentation and relies very heavily upon domain modeling.
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Using Mocks to Verify Interactions In the March 2006 issue of Better Software magazine, Dan North began a discussion of the evolution of behavior-driven development from test-driven development. Here, North continues the conversation with closer look at "mocks," utility classes that, for testing purposes, pretend to be some component or service with which your object will interact.
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Not Your Father's Test Automation If you think that test automation is mostly about executing tests, then you're missing out on a big opportunity. Or rather, you're missing a lot of small opportunities adding up to a big one. Consider this: stop thinking about test automation as merely executing automated tests, stop thinking about test automation as something you need expensive tools for, and start discovering automation you can implement in a couple of days and usually with extremely inexpensive tools or tools you already have available. In this week's column, Danny Faught and James Bach suggest taking a more Agile approach to test automation.
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Preventing Late Tasks from Creating Late Projects We like to think that being late on one task isn't so bad because early and late completions will average out over the course of an entire project. If you flip a coin 1,000 times, it will land on heads about 500 times and on tails about 500 times. If your project has 1,000 tasks, about 500 will finish early and about 500 will finish late, right? Wrong--and many project plans are sunk by this common misperception.
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Testers Shine on Agile Projects Agile projects draw testers out of the background and into the spotlight. Testers play a distinctive role and drive product development by creating acceptance tests before any code is even written. Johanna Rothman sets the stage and explains the benefits of giving testers their chance to shine.
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Agile Codeline Management Software developers often view version management tools and techniques as a necessary evil. This is particularly true of developers practicing agile techniques. However, version management, can be an aid to agility rather than something that gets in the way.
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Where Are the Testers in XP? With Extreme Programming, programmers are taking responsibility for writing their own unit tests. What work does this leave for testers? Some people think that XP saves costs by eliminating the need for testers. Does programmer testing really take the place of tester testing? In this column, Bret Pettichord offers ways for testers to provide value to XP teams.
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