The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Part III. Delivering Reliably

It’s October again. Over the past year (see Part II), your team has been working hard at developing its Delivering fluency, and now you’re a well-oiled machine. You’ve never enjoyed your work more: the little annoyances and friction you associate with professional software development—broken builds, frustrating bug hunts, painstaking change analysis—have all melted away. Now you can start a task and have it in production a few hours later.

Your only regret is that your team didn’t pursue Delivering fluency from the beginning. In retrospect, it would have been faster and easier, but people wanted to take it slow. Oh, well. Now you know.

As you enter the team room, you see Valeri and Bo working together at a pairing station. They both like to come in early to beat rush-hour traffic. Valeri sees you putting away your backpack and catches your attention.

“Are you available to pair this morning?” she asks. She’s never been one for chit-chat. “Bo and I have been working on the real-time updates and he said you might have some ideas about how to test the networking code.”

You nod. “Duncan and I spiked it yesterday and came up with something promising. Do you want to pair, or should the three of us mini-mob?”

“You can pair with Valeri,” Bo calls over, getting up and stretching. “I need a break from networking code.” He mock-shudders. “Even CSS is better than this.” Valeri rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “I’ll let you get settled in,” she says to you. ...