Adventures in Agile Development

I've started a new project, with a new team, under a new development methodology. And for the most part I am happy with that. We have a small team of two developers and an architect/manager/used to be coder, and we are going as agile as possible.

Now Agile development means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It is so bad that saying that you are an agile shop can mean almost anything you want it to. So to alleviate some of the confusion, here is some of what we are doing.

1. Daily Scrum. This is a 10-15 minute meeting every morning to talk about what is going on with your code. Where are we at, what are we trying to do.
2. Test Driven development. This means having tests for as much as possible (NUnit in our case). Granted, you cannot test everything, but there are development patterns that allow you to test most of what you do. Chief among them is the MVP pattern (Model-View-Presenter). I'll talk more about this later.
3. Frequent check-ins. It goes like this. Write a test for your code. Write the code. Make sure the test works. Check in. This means you are checking in up to four times per day. It also means you are less likely to get lost in all the things you are trying to do. And it means you need a source control system (we are using Subversion), and an automated build process (we are using NANT and Cruise Control).
4. The customer is allowed to get the daily build. This way they can keep up to date with what you are doing.
5. Now throw in an alphabet soup of other best-practice-somewhere technologies like Rhino Mocks, Spring, and NHibernate . You see there is a lot to learn.
   

Luckily, Agile and Test driven development have reached a critical mass such that there are now tools to help you with this process. I've already mentioned NUnit, NAnt, Subversion, and Cruise Control. But there is also the excellent Microsoft Team Systems that has all of those tools bundled together.

Another tool that wasn't listed that we are also using is ReSharper. Very cool tool with a lot of enhancements to Visual Studio.NET -- and a little bit of pain as well. ReSharper has an extremely large collection of shortcuts, so many that it actually overwrites a number of Visual Studio.NET shortcuts. But, it does have a feature to deal with that. Any time you his a shortcut that both ReSharper and Visual Studio.NET want, a dialog pops up asking which short-cut to use. I guess that is the best compromise. Anyway, for the side of ReSharper, the refactorings, and unit test integrations make it worth the cost of entry (a little over $100).

Now, this is enough for right now. I hate overly long rambling blog posts, and I'm afraid this will have to turn into a series. So, next time I'll write up what MVP, Spring, NUnit, and Rhino Mocks have to do with each other.