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Agile Development Practices

This category contains topics associated with Agile Development including Agile Development practices and how the role of a developer is different in an Agile environment.

There are major shifts in the way development is done in an Agile environment that have a dramatic impact on the role of developers:

  • Instead of simply writing code against a set of relatively well-defined and detailed requirements, developers are expected to work with much more general and loosely-defined requirements and communicate directly to business users to further define and elaborate those requirements as the project is in progress
  • Instead of working independently on an area of software code and later working to integrate that effort with other components of the solution, developers are expected to play an active role in working directly with other team members to develop well-integrated overall solution
  • Instead of a Project Manager planning, organizing and tracking completion of their tasks, developers are expected to take responsibility for most of these functions themselves

This new environment creates some very new and significant challenges for developers as well as new tools that may be needed. Some significant examples include:

  • Taking more responsibility for integrating quality and testing into the design of the project
  • Performing much more frequent release and integration of the software

Please check the articles associated with this category for more detail:

Is UML Still Relevant Today? How Is it Used in an Agile Environment?

Role of UML Diagrams

I’ve seen a lot of questions about Unified Modeling Language (UML) that center around “Is UML still relevant today?” and “How is it used in an Agile environment?”. I will try to address these questions in this blog post. What is UML? UML stands for “Unified Modeling Language”. Here is a definition of UML: ” […]

Is UML Still Relevant Today? How Is it Used in an Agile Environment? Read More »

Agile and Scrum Engineering Practices

Is Agile and Scrum Anti-engineering?

I recently participated in an online discussion on the topic of “Is Agile and Scrum Anti-Engineering?”.  This question seems to be based on a number of popular stereotypes that people have about Agile and Scrum engineering practices.  For example, a popular stereotype is that an Agile project consists of just a bunch of “cowboy software

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What Is an Agile Developer? How Is the Role Different?

What Is an Agile Developer?

The role of an Agile Developer is not well-understood and many developers may have difficulty making this transition. In a traditional plan-driven environment (aka “Waterfall”), a developer might be able to sit in his/her cube with their headset on listening to some cool tunes. And, he/she could be fairly isolated from the rest of the

What Is an Agile Developer? How Is the Role Different? Read More »