Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.
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Who does the UX on a scrum project?
OK. Let's say you're working on a textbook scrum project. You've got a scrum master collaborating with a product owner. The next sprint is UI-heavy - by the time your coders start building screens, ...
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How do you include Support in your Sprint?
Our company moved to Scrum recently on a product that was almost coded by a single person (Joe). We have support to do with our exising customers that we try to integrate in our process.
For now we ...
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408 views
Is an architecture description document a violation of the DRY Principle?
The DRY Principle (Don't Repeat Yourself) states that "every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." Most of the time this refers to code, ...
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Extreme Programming practices make an application more error prone? [closed]
I am conducting academic research on the topic of Extreme Programming and whether its practices lead to creating space for more errors and bugs in applications.
From the experiences I gathered from ...
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TDD - what are the short term gains/benefits?
Quite often benefits of using TDD are considered as 'long term' gains - the overall code will be better structured, more testable, overall less bugs reported by customers, etc.
However, where are ...
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What to do with estimation of incomplete story?
I am part of a development team that is relatively new to Scrum, suppose that at the end of the sprint a few large stories are either in progress or were not accepted by the PO.
Firstly, what ...
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Design documents as part of Agile
At my workplace, we face a challenge in that "agile" too often has meant "vague requirements, bad acceptance criteria, good luck!" We're trying to address that, as a general improvement effort. So, ...
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eXtreme Programming (XP) Methodology Testing
I am about to undertake a project for university, and given the project scope I have decided to use XP/agile methodology. I have began with developing a use case diagram; gathering user stories for ...
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Is it a good idea to appoint one of the scrum team member or scrum master as Product Owner?
Lately we had a project, in which client was busy touring. As usual scrum team was formed, management decided to appoint our analyst as Product owner since Client won’t be able to participate ...
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How to write “SMART” Objectives as an agile developer?
Like many corporations the company I work for is transitioning to a performance review system based on SMART objectives. My team is a high functioning agile development team employing practices from ...
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Office design and layout for agile development
(moved from stackoverflow)
I have found lot of discussions here on about which keyboard, desk, light or colored background is best - but I can't find one addressing the layout of the whole office.
...
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How do I treat application aspects with regard to features and user stories?
When drawing up a backlog, I have several requirements that apply to a great many user stories, i.e. aspects of the application like error handling and feedback. How do I include these (without using ...
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Scrum for specialists teams
Scrum is best for teams with generalists members, that is teams where 2 people at least can do the same tasks. My main concern is to find good solutions to adapt scrum (what to keep, what to remove, ...
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Is the agile approach compatible with having contractors on staff?
On the one hand, the agile approach stresses a tight-knit team that holds each other accountable and accepts collective ownership of the project.
On the other hand, companies use contract programmers ...
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Any experience with “beginner's mind” in pair programming?
The article "Promiscuous Pairing and Beginner’s Mind" (PDF) suggests that you put someone in the pair that knows the least about the particular area of the code base. It also suggests that you swap ...
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With agile, what do when a user story doesn't get completed in an iteration?
Do you just move the story to a new iteration, or delay the next iteration?
It gets a bit tricky when you use something like Jira when you have to copy or move around stories between iterations as it ...
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Where should code refactoring and optimization fit within both an agile and waterfall process timeline?
There appears to be this notion among the project management team that stating that "it works" means it should then be deemed 100% complete. Most programmers know that isn't always the case. If I'm ...
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How can a team apply the Scrum methodology without a clear customer?
Our team is trying to understand and adapt Scrum and other agile practices, but we can not figure out how to deal with customer feedback when there is no customer. Every document about the subject ...
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Can scrum master allocate tasks?
We are following scrum in our project. I see most of the times the scrum master allocates the tasks for us. However, I read from many scrum books that scrum works the other way around (the 'pull' ...
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What software development process should I learn first for a solo project? [closed]
I want to develop a project on my own (if it is sucessful more people might start working on it too). Also I want to apply some proper software engineering from the first until the last day. On one ...
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Are there advantages to agile practices other than having a working build between sprints?
I recently became interested in agile practices in software development and I since have seen a lot of articles point out that these practices allow for reduced overall costs.
The logic behind that ...
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How do bug reports factor in to a sprint?
I've been reading up on Scrum recently. From my understanding, a meeting is held before the sprint starts, to decide what gets moved from the product backlog to the upcoming sprint backlog. Once a ...
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Reasons for Pair Programming [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Pair Programming: Pros and Cons
I've worked in a few shops where management has passed the idea of pair programming either to me or another manager/developer, and I ...
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Does late have any meaning in Agile methodologies?
This came out of some of the answers and comments on another question (this one).
I've worked primarily with waterfall projects and while I've worked on ad-hoc projects that have taken on agile ...
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Should the number of developers be considered when estimating a task?
I am pretty inexperienced with working in agile projects but I have tried it a few times and I always run into this problem when estimating a task.
Do we bring into the estimate the number of ...
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In Agile development, who owns the software “features” and how to you manage the development?
Some development teams in my company are switching to Agile development practices and their developers' work seem to be diminishing to discuss and program minutia about trivial software features ...
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Acceptance tests done first…how can this be accomplished?
The basic gist of most Agile methods is that a feature is not "done" until it's been developed, tested, and in many cases released. This is supposed to happen in quick turnaround chunks of time such ...
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One-week release cycle: how do I make this feasible?
At my company (3-yr-old web industry startup), we have frequent problems with the product team saying "aaaah this is a crisis patch it now!" (doesn't everybody?)
This has an impact on the ...
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Can I use “user stories” for process improvement tasks?
We currently use JIRA to track our development work. My management wants to format and categorize everything as "User Stories," including non-software development related tasks. For example:
"As a ...
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Code Reviews, what are the advantages? [closed]
In my team, we don't do formal code reviews. We tend to think that it's enough with pair programming and rotating pairs often.
Should we consider doing formal code reviews?
What would be the ...
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How to use unit tests as a source of information?
A colleague of mine was one a seminar about agile development, where he heard it is possible to use unit tests as a technical documentation. Something like using unit tests as example how to use the ...
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What does it mean to be agile?
We have a project that everyone says we will be doing in a agile way but I doubt we have clearly understood what agile is.
In previous projects we had planning meetings, then defined the product back ...
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Relationship between user story, feature, and epic?
As someone whose still new to agile, I'm not sure I completely understand the relationship or difference between a user story, feature, and epic.
According to this question, a feature is a collection ...
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What does a good “definition of done” for a mature team look like?
When looking at examples of definitions of done in various sources, they usually include points like
code completed
unit tests run
code peer-reviewed or paired
code checked in
documentation updated
...
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Agile estimation with tech-debt
When estimating (story points) a story that consists on extending a current functionality with a known tech-debt, should we consider the effort that will be spent to refactor the current code or ...
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How to manage Agile developers working with traditional (serial) business persons?
Good afternoon,
My work environment has some problems. Our IT team is trying to be more agile, but we're not really getting buy-in from the business. They attend our daily stand-ups and sprint ...
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How to handle 'external' dependencies in scrum?
If you've planned a number of user stories for a sprint and one candidate story is dependent on some external provider delivering something to your team. For example an online service provider adding ...
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Moving from a traditional waterfall methodology to an agile one
My development team is in the process of 'going agile' and lot of people are looking at each other blankly, not really too sure what it means. All management are saying is 'start working agile' ...
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What is the bug workflow on your agile/Scrum team?
What is the bug workflow on your agile/Scrum team?
Here is ours:
- If the bug is related to a story in the current sprint, we fix it.
- If the bug is not related to a story in the current sprint and ...
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Should we adopt an agile methodology when rewriting an existing application from scratch?
I work for a small product based company. We are about to re-write our existing product from scratch. We are planing to adopt Agile methodology for our development. Now my question is as we have all ...
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Real world Agile practices and estimates
In a perfect world, we tell the client we follow an agile methodology where we allow the scope to increase/decrease as the requirements change and we bill per hour for each iteration.
In reality, ...
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Evaluating a product owner
How do you evaluate a product owner? More specifically, how would one conduct a performance review of a product owner? What qualities or characteristics would one look at when reviewing a product ...
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What is the difference between Acceptance Test-Driven Planning and Acceptance Test-Driven Development?
What is the difference between Acceptance Test--Driven Planning and Acceptance Test--Driven Development? Are they the same?
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How can you plan long range resources and budgets when using Agile methodology?
Agile does not encourage a lot of up-front design. This is good from a requirements management and software development standpoint, and allows the project to adapt to changing business needs.
...
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Should all developers on a team have equal role/responsibility in writing and updating software design documents
I've asked a very similar question few days ago, but because I presented too much of my company's current situation, most answers focused completely on something that I wasn't looking to answer. So I ...
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How can I influence my team to become more agile
I consider myself an agile developer, I have set up CI in the last three teams I have worked with, and in my previous role worked in a style which revolved around writing failing tests before fixing ...
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Do story points have a direct relation with task estimates?
In my current team, where we run multiple scrums, the Story points are usually based on the effort required to complete the User Story. For example if an User Story has 2 tasks, both needing 5 days ...
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What programming skills does someone in QA need to work effectively in extreme programming projects?
Well, the title really says it all, but to elaborate a bit, can you take a random, typically effective QA department and have them learn to work in an XP environment (with a learning curve to pick up ...
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The Agile process: how and what should be documented?
A while ago the company I work for had outsourced a development project to a third party. They employed agile practices in developing the solution. However when asked for documentation they would just ...
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A good guide on choosing the point scale to use with Agile/SCRUM?
We're using Pivotal Tracker for our project, which lets us choose from these three point scales:
0,1,2,3
0,2,4,8
0,1,3,5,8
And I'm looking for a resource to help guide our decision. (After using ...


