Brad Storm’s Lofty Thoughts

So, there you are, the iteration is on and you get assigned / choose a task for you to do. Some project manager has decided what tasks should fill this iteration and it’s up to you, the developer, to come through with a solution. As a developer you have to relate to several parameters:

• What’s the time frame for this task?
• What is this task really about (details and purpose)?
• How does this task fit into the big picture (the application as a whole)?

To answer these questions, agile development introduce the DOMAIN WALKTHROUGH

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There’s a lot of focus on agile methodologies. And the coices are almost endless: Scrum, extreme programming, feature driven development, the crystal family, agile RUP and many, many more. Although they all have their own domain, their own rules and tricks, they’re also well connected through the Agile Manifesto (www.agilemanifesto.org).

In short, agile development is about creating quality software according to what the user wants, not necessarily what the customer has specified up front. To do this, the agile team strips down the requirement spesifications and starts working on it, piece by piece. Every part is discussed, tested, developed (in that order), refactored, tested again and acknowledged by the customer. The agile teams are self-organized, transparent in their work and with a great team-spirit attitude.

But for the lone programmer, who want’s to become a member of this agile party, what can he do? What happens when the team member commits to a task and goes back to his desk, asked to come back with some working code that meets the requirements? This is what this blog is all about. Welcome to the agile developer: the guy who delivers quality software within a changing environment of uncertainty, excactly as the customer wants it.

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