Agile Software Design and Programming

#text-block-10 { margin-bottom:0px; text-align:left; }

Architecture

How much architecture and design is done on an Agile project and when. How Agile architecture differs from traditional architecture. The roles and responsibilities of architects and tech leads.

Communication Skills

Skills to enable collaboration in the team. How to communicate and interact with other personalities. Daily stand-ups and retrospectives share information within the team. Pair programming can solve difficult problems and distribute knowledge about the system, but requires discipline to use.

Planning

Writing user stories and breaking epics down into smaller stories. Managing non-functional requirements with technical stories. Estimating the size of each story. Scheduling work based on stories.

#text-block-11 { margin-bottom:0px; text-align:left; }

Specification by Example

Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) ensures the focus is on what the customer wants/needs and drives the TDD cycle. Cucumber and FitNesse allow user requirements to be automatically verified when written as specifications that contain examples. User interface tests and non-functional tests can also be automated.

Design

Using modelling notations to explore the design with others. Patterns provide pre-packaged solutions to common problems. Principles like SOLID, patterns and simplicity establish good practices. Technical debt arises when the designs decay over time and needs techniques to monitor it so that it can be addressed.

Unit Testing

Principles and anatomy of unit tests and how they are applied with JUnit or NUnit. Common patterns for creating and structuring tests and fixtures to avoid duplication and manage performance. Smells that identify problems with the tests.

Refactoring

Code smells identify code that should be refactored into a better design. Refactoring patterns provide safe ways to change and restructure code. A good unit test (regression) suite provides confidence that nothing is broken in the process of refactoring. Unit tests can be added to legacy code by looking for seams that can be used to isolate the unit to be tested.

Test-Driven Development

What is TDD and how is it practiced? Test first focusses thinking on the design and the desired result. Using behaviour to identify what to test with Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD).

Team Tools

Using automated tools to build, test and deploy the system. Different types of version control and how they provide a single code base with the ability to roll-back changes. Continuous integration uses automated builds and version control to manage integrating the work of multiple developers.

Environments

Structuring the physical work environment such as open-plan offices, having the team in one place, etc. Dashboards and other information radiators make it easy for the team members to see the status of the project and system.