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Currently I'm working alone on a small project for University and I wondered: Does it make sense to apply methodologies (XP, Scrum) or parts of it? If only for experience? Or does it produce too much "overhead"? And if it does, which one would fit best?
Methodologies give the approach to tackling a development, to me it would still be applicable if there was one or 100 people on the project. The only difference as you being the sole developer would take on multiple roles within the development.
It's certainly an interesting idea to be able to sprint towards getting a set of goals done in a certain time. It might add some motivation to hitting a deadline, and preventing feature-bloat.
As any skill, project management side of development improves with practice, so I'd say it's worth trying out.
Worth noting that XP and Scrum are development methodologies not project management methodologies.
Development methodologies (such as XP and Scrum) govern areas such as requirements gathering, development techniques, testing and release.
Project management methodologies (such as PRINCE2) cover elements such as scheduling and planning, risk and issue management, project scoping and business case management.
But the accepted answer is right regardless. Unless you're the only person who will ever see the software, input into it, code on it or interact with it in any way at all, methodologies of both sorts will absolutely have something to offer and should be looked at. Even if you are the only person they can still be useful.
Some of this depends on where you intend to go with your work: you're working alone today, but are you planning (or at least hoping) to build something big enough that you will need help? If so, then it is good to get some practices in place upfront - not so much that it will slow you down, but something that you can build on when you create your team.
A colleague of mine, who has left architecting high-volume trading systems to build software for the iPod and iPad, has done some thinking about this now that he is a team of 1. You might find it helpful:
link text
If you are working alone, then pair programming may be a bit of a challenge. :) At the same time, having a story board and moving cards may be useful for others to see if they are connected to your project,e.g. end-users or project managers. My suggestion is to read up on various approaches and if it seems like it may work, do a trial and see how if it makes things better or not.
I have worked on projects by myself and you definitely need to play multiple roles. I'm a better developer now than before I worked on my own, and definitely I can integrate to any development team working with XP and Scrum since I made sure than when I worked by myself I would do the best practices XP and Scrum suggests.
The only thing you couldn't apply is pair programming. Besides that everything is possible playing multiple roles, it will enhance your development for sure.
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I've been working on a CodeIgniter project with a friend of mine for almost a year now. We feel that our development process isn't as effective as we wanted to be, and currently we're not employing any software development methodologies. We're 2 man team, looking to have more people to work with us in the future, but we don't have enough people to start on scrum.
Right now, we're both working on this project on the side, would be nice to know which methodologies are best for us, to get our development going faster and more efficient.
Agile and Scrum won't make you faster or more efficient:
Since you tagged this with agile and scrum, I thought I'd mention this: neither agile nor Scrum has as its goal faster or more efficient development as you ask for in your question. In fact, changing to these approaches involves a significant learning curve, but if practiced well contributes toward very low defect rates, software that meets the customer's needs, and a development process that responds to changing requirements. Used long enough, Scrum can provide good data about roughly how much work a specific team can get done in a period of time.
Still, you might benefit from some practices:
All that said, there are a couple practices that may want to try:
Pair Programming and Test Driven Design (TDD)
Continuous Integration
TDD is not easy to learn, especially on your own. See if you can attend a CodeRetreat or similar event.
If you aren't already using a modern software change management tool (SCM) like Mercurial, git, or subversion, get one and learn how to use it.
Get regular feedback from "customer"
If you don't already know (you didn't say in your post), you might ask yourself who you are making the software for. Can you frequently and regularly demo it to that person and get feedback? Find out what they want next and put those items at the top of the backlog.
Try to make your product incrementally useful
Rather than making big product-wide changes, add small useful amounts of functionality. Your design will drift but if you have sufficient automated tests in place you can refactor as needed.
I'm curious why you say you don't have enough to do some form of scrum?
You're both on the team, one of you can own the process and the other or both of you can be the product owner. You do your daily scrum so you can know what each of you are doing - picking the work from the backlog you agreed to do. And as you add members you'll already have an established practice they can integrate into.
You can work in 2-4 week sprints, do sprint planning,review, and retrospective regardless of the number of members.
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I'm working on a software project which several members are working from home and some other are part-timers. We meet physically one time each month at least. We communicate mostly by emails. Our source code repository (mercurial) is on a jungle disk (workgroup) that we share together.
We have a working product and one customer. But, we are not agile enough (ie: one change in the code sometimes break something else, we don't have unit testing, code is not documented, etc.) I want to use an Agile methodology to coordinate our work and track our progresses. I also want to use TDD.
The team has no experience with agile methodologies (or other methodologies).
What is the best approach to use an Agile methodology with a geographically distributed team? Which methodology is best with that kind of team? How to implement it efficiently with the least resistance possible?
Thanks!
I have done this as part of a distributed XP team sharing source code and stories across 3 sites, each site being 12 hours apart (Seattle, Bournemouth UK, and Singapore).
Here are some write-ups of what we did:
Distributed Agile Patterns: http://www.keithbraithwaite.demon.co.uk/professional/papers/index.html#europlop2005
http://www.keithbraithwaite.demon.co.uk/professional/papers/index.html#xp2005
We found that it helps to get everybody physically together at the start of the project to establish standards and to build relationships.
We also found that it helps to have "ambassadors" - shipping different people around between teams to spread knowledge and build trust.
We were lucky to have three sites that were each 12 hours apart - so we could have a stand-up meeting first-thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. We called them "hand-over meetings" and did them over video-conference between the incoming team and the outgoing team.
We also found remote pair-programming worked - between a local pair and a remote pair (i.e. four people) but that it's very intense and draining and best done only for short periods of time when it's really critical to see what other people are doing remotely.
Aside: Kent Beck's Advice for people using Eclipse to remote pair: http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=584
Well, my first thought, given what you specified:
Add unit tests to your source code!
Without unit testing, most Agile methodology isn't all that useful. Being Agile is about being light and being able to respond to change quickly - unit testing is one of the main things that makes that work. Without unit testing, you'll never have the freedom to make changes without risking major breakage.
As you add tests, I would document your code. This, again, is critical for being able to change things, even more so when the team is distributed.
Once that's done, you can start implementing other methodology over time. Personally, I would have the entire team do this, and get started on having daily/weekly stand-ups (which work fine with a distributed team via conference calls, etc), where everyone describes what they've tested, how they're progressing, etc.
That will at least get you on the proper track...
Have a quick browse through this blog:
You're not agile if your team is dispersed. Yeah right!
Start with a Continuous Integration (automated build). I used CruiseControl.Net. I had two builds set up: 1) an automated build after every check-in and 2) a test build to build on demand.
You have to improve your communication for a start. Yes, engineering practices are important, but the key to agile is communication. Email is not the most effective tool to coordinate an agile project, but there are not shortage of tools out there that can help.
We have had great success with Skype (mostly pm, but also normal phone), and also with tools like MS SharedView it is possible to demo and even pair programme across sites.
Once you start to communicate effectively and feel like a team, the rest will follow. Agile is all about inspecting and adapting, so try things out and have fun with it. Start with the daily stand up and move on from there. Regular retrospectives will help you identify you problems and improve.
If you are into tools: To be able to do pair-programming or synchronous code reviews remotely, you could try the eclipse plugin Saros, which enables collaborative editing (including support for driver/observer roles and following users through the code).
(Disclaimer: Saros is a project of my working group at Freie Universität Berlin)
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I am going to be starting a new job in a few weeks where I will be responsible for both the maintenance and development of a couple of existing web applications and the development of new web applications.
As I will be the only developer on the project and the previous developer was more of a hobbyist, no formal project management or planning techniques have been followed. Additionally no bug tracking has been used or if anything has been recorded its just been notes on paper.
I would therefore like to introduce a better system to help resolve some of the issues and help ensure things run more smoothly. I intend to develop using an agile process (likely scrum) and would therefore like to know what all-in-one solutions people could recommend for me to look into further. I am looking for something which will provide at minimum:
Project Planning
Defining new features
Time estimating
Ability to organise tasks by priority
Project Management
Tracking active tasks
Reporting
Bug Tracking
I would also like to let other staff easily submit new bugs in the applications which they find or customers report. Additionally support for them to add new stories / high level tasks would be of use so they can note down other new requirments/features and I can then work with them to outline more detailed tasks and estimates.
So far I have looked at a number of systems including:
FogBugz - Seems great for bug reporting but would need something else for project planning / management
Agile Buddy - This is probably the best solution I have found so far
Trac
Smart Sheets
Pivotal Tracker
However, as I have not actually used any of these systems myself I do not know what ones would be best or whether there is a better solution out there??? So any recommendations you can provide would be much appreciated.
Actually, FogBugz does project management as well. It will even try to learn how accurate time estimates for features are from each user, and give you estimated milestone completion times accordingly, with probabilities of finishing at various dates. I've used it for the bug tracking, and really liked it, but I've also read enough about its project management features to know that it has them, and they're pretty good.
FogBugz feature list
When I was working as a solitary developer, I picked up a copy of Planning Extreme Programming and bought a pack of 3x5 cards and a plastic box for them. I used those in the Planning Game and stuck the ones I was working on on my wall. My boss could walk by and see what I was working on. This worked well and cost little.
We're currently using Zen at work - it's a web-based Kanban board for planning. This is nice when your stakeholders aren't co-located or if priorities/requirements change frequently.
You can enter bugs as user stories with either system, or you could use a separate defect-tracking system.
I'd question if Scrum is suitable for a one-developer shop. It's targeted towards project management. I'd rather not have a stand-up meeting with myself. ;) XP (minus pair programming) works fine for a solitary developer.
For a one-man show, you don't need any tools to speak of.
Tools -- generally -- are for coordination.
If it's just you, what -- precisely -- are you coordinating?
If you want to make things visible, a pair of simple internally-focused web pages built from static content will do.
Bugs.
Burndown for Features.
That's about it. Use the simplest tools you can possibly use. I recommend using docutils to generate the HTML from plain, simple text.
Don't go tool-happy until you have a large enough team that simple text doesn't work any more.
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We are starting off on a new from scratch implementation of an eCommerce solution and have decided on the framework to use too. There will be people joining the project who never really had any experience working on this framework. How should we go about doing the knowledge management/transfer? What could be the other challenges we need to be prepared for and how?
I can think of starting a WIKI with the most often needed content and addressing the most common roadblocks...Is that a good idea?
A glossary will go a long way.
Make sure that you and your team use the glossary when talking. There's no point having specific words for things if you don't use them correctly.
Stand up meetings each day should help with whatever roadblocks you have.
Make sure that your team has as high bandwidth communication as possible but also allow for quiet time where people can focus. Maybe have the first 15min. of each hour as a time when people can walk up to each other and ask questions etc. Then the other 45min is silent time. Reassess this to get a balance that everyone fits with.
I second the wiki recommendation - we have had a great deal of success using it to form a knowledge base and glossary for our projects.
Another technique that has worked well for us is creating a scratch repository (e.g. SVN, Git, etc.) for the purpose of technology ramp up spikes. We're currently working on an enterprise-scale project leveraging Spring's OSGi support, and we created several spike projects to explore different facets of the technology. This helped us grasp the technology before getting too encumbered by the business needs.
As far as challenges for which to be prepared? Expect the unexpected. Any time you embark on using a new framework/technology, you will run into roadblocks and your initial velocity will suffer. My best advice - simple determination. Don't give up on your framework at the first sign of stormy weather. Work through the issues. Eventually you'll clear most of the hurdles and your velocity will increase exponentially as the entire team gets more comfortable with the technology.
I think this is the ideal situation for a wiki. Let the developers choose which wiki to use, because they're the ones that will be using it!
There is this thread:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.738060.3
You might consider Alfresco.com's open source solution for content management.
I think the Wiki is a good idea, but there is also no substitute for real code. To that end a good quality (reference) implementation of a single function, which shows all the layers in the code stack, ie from browser/form down to the DB and back again.
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There are numerous Agile software development methods. Which ones have you used in practice to deliver a successful project, and how did the method contribute to that success?
I've been involved with quite a few organisations which claimed to work in an 'agile' way, and their processed usually seemed to be base on XP (extreme programming), but none of them ever followed anywhere near all the practices.
That said, I can probably comment on a few of the XP practices
Unit testing seems to prove very useful if it's done from the start of a project, but it seems very difficult to come into an existing code-base and start trying to add unit tests. If you get the opportunity to start from scratch, test driven development is a real help.
Continuous integration seems to be a really good thing (or rather, the lack of it is really bad). That said, the organisations I've seen have usually been so small as to make any other approach seem foolish.
User story cards are nice in that it's great to have a physical object to throw around for prioritisation, but they're not nearly detailed enough unless your developer really knows the domain, or you've got an onsite customer (which I've never actually seen).
Standup meetings tend to be really useful for new team members to get to know everyone, and what they work on. The old hands very quickly slack off, and just say things like 'I'm still working on X', which they've been doing for the past week - It takes a strong leader to force them to delve into details.
Refactoring is now a really misused term, but when you've got sufficient unit tests, it's really useful to conceptually separate the activity of 'changing the design of the existing code without changing the functionality' from 'adding new functionality'
Scrum because it shows where the slackers are. It also identifies much faster that the business unit usually doesn't have a clue what they really want delivered
Scrum.
The daily standup meeting is a great way to make sure things stay on track and progress is being made. I also think it's key to get the product/market folks involved in the process in a real, meaningful way. It'll create a more collaborative environment and removes a lot of the adversarial garbage that comes up when the product team and the dev teams are separate "silos".
Having regular retrospectives is a great way to help a team become more effective/agile.
More than adhering to a specific flavor of Agile this practice can help a team identify what is working well and adapt to a changing environment.
Just make sure the person running the retrospective knows what he/she is doing otherwise it can degenerate into a complaining session.
There are a number of exercises you can take a team through to help them reflect and extract value from the retrospective. I suggest listening to the interview with Linda Rising on Software Engineering Radio for a good introduction.
Do a Google search for "Heartbeat retrospectives" for more information.
I've been working with a team using XP and Scrum practices sprinkled with some lean. It's been very productive.
Daily Standup- helps us keep complete track of what and where everyone is working on.
Pair Programming- has improved our code base and helped remove "silly" bugs being introduced into the system.
iterative development- using 1 week iterations has helped up improve our velocity by setting more direct goals which has also helped us size requirements
TDD- has helped me change my way of programming, now I don't write any code that doesn't fix a broken test and I don't write any test that doesn't have a clearly defined requirement. We've also been using executable requirements which has really helped devs and BAs reach requirements understandings.
kanban boards- show in real time where we are. We have one for the Milestone as well as the current iteration. At a glance you can see what is left to do and what's being done and what's done and accepted. If you don't report in your daily standup something pertaining to what's on the board you have explaining to do.
co-located team- everyone is up to speed and on page with what everyone else is doing. communication is just-in-time, very productive, I don't miss my cube at all.