Agile Technical Practices

Continuous Integration & Deployment

The ability to deliver small valuable units of work with low risk and at low cost requires Continuous Integration. CI servers need to be configured to work within the context of your organisation for the applications you deploy and to scale accordingly. CI can provide a build life-cycle for each application indicating current health. Providing fast feedback of small problems leads to faster resolution and helps prevent large and expensive problems. CI can be used to automate many manual tasks freeing up valuable development capacity.

Development Practices

Why are some developers more productive than others? A large part of the answer is in the development practices and technical skills they possess. Any given code base contains technical debt but few developers are adept at identifying and reducing it. With mentoring, developers can learn how to write code that is easy to maintain rather than easy to write.

Starting with User Stories as requirements Agile development practices focus on how to build quality into the product as early as possible and reduce costly rework. Understanding how to break up stories into tasks in a repeatable consistent way can help reduce risk and make delivery patterns more predictable. Test Driven Development helps to grow object oriented software systems of higher quality with lower cost of change. The cost of maintaining legacy code can also be reduced and simplified using this technique to slowly replace error prone complex code with elegant maintainable code wrapped in quality tests. Many technical development practices can be learnt far more effectively through one-on-one coaching than any other method, our coaches can quickly pass on technical skills through pair programming and other techniques to seed development teams with expertise. Mastering these valuable technical skills builds a common ideal of quality within teams and organisations and motivates individuals through achievement and progress.