Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Breakthrough

A good way to make sure you always have working software is to develop “stop the line” behavior with your builds by applying the “Fix It Now!” rule to build breaks. Successful builds are critical to maintaining the rhythm of the team by enabling constantly working software, early discovery of defects, and keeping everyone on a new build every day. The “Fix It Now!” concept drives home the point that the goal of always having working software takes precedence over all other work.

Here is how this breakthrough works: As a team, establish a definition for what constitutes build success. Keep it simple, but tough. For instance, anything that keeps the build from reporting success is a build break. Build success is reported in binary ...