#engineering-practices

Scrum is founded in the belief that self-organizing teams can figure out what they need. When true, this is sometimes not sufficient. And sometimes, particularly in software development, it seems not to be true. Ken demonstrated this repeatedly in the class.

Technical practices of XP such as TDD, Refactoring, CI and Pair Programming support emergent design and enable evolving your architecture. The first practice you need for continuous delivery is CI, committing to mainline every day.

You’ve probably heard of Agile development somewhere. It’s one of the most popular ways of making software these days. With Agile development, you can pump out functioning software within a few weeks and make both your developers and your clients happy.

Working as Technical Lead is very exciting; every day you have new challenges, new problems to solve and a great deal of satisfaction. However, sometimes you need some tips in order to improve and empower your teams.

Fran O'Hara, Director and Principal Consultant at Inspire Quality Services, recently shared his lessons learnt integrating test into the agile lifecycle. O'Hara's core message is that test competencies are needed even when traditional testing roles are gone.

At the Agile Singapore conference last year Steve Freeman spoke about the way TDD has been misinterpreted and frequently misapplied in many adoptions and how the SOLID architectural principles are still important, perhaps more important now than in the past.

This is not a cardinal rule. This is a outdated and obsolete mode of thinking. Change is how you discover great UX. Change is how you refactor and reduce technical debt. Change is how you incrementally improve both your product and code quality.