The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Development

It’s startling how rarely software development processes actually talk about the nuts and bolts of development. The way your team develops matters. It’s how you spend most of your time.

This chapter includes practices to speed up your development and make it more reliable:

• “Zero Friction” removes the delays that slow down development.

• “Continuous Integration” keeps your latest code ready to release.

• “Test-Driven Development” ensures your software does exactly what programmers intend it to do.

• “Fast, Reliable Tests” prevents tests from becoming a bottleneck.

• “Refactoring” enables programmers to improve the design of existing code.

• “Spike Solutions” helps programmers learn through small, isolated experiments.

DEVELOPMENT SOURCES

I first encountered the practices in this chapter through Extreme Programming. Some of them aren’t in the original XP books; instead, they were part of the conversation surrounding XP on Ward Cunningham’s original wiki at c2.com.

Zero Friction is a modern version of XP’s “Ten-Minute Build.”

Continuous Integration also comes from XP. It’s widely misunderstood, so people have come up with new names for it—“trunk-based development” and “continuous delivery” are popular—but continuous integration, as defined in XP, encompasses both. [Beck2004] (ch. 7)

Test-Driven Development is one of XP’s most famous practices. It was originally called “Test-First Programming.” The related practice, Fast, Reliable Tests, is based on ...