Articles filed in category 'Agile Development'

If you’ve ever argued with management about how unit testing is beneficial, speeds up the process in the long run, and makes the software work better, you’ll recognize John’s point of view. If you haven’t (yet) had the argument, you’ll want to have this article handy.

Rod's project continues and he gives us some good advice about managing a team.

If you’ve been developing IDEs in .NET, you’ve probably heard about JetBrains’ Rider. Chris and Maarten show you that the time is right to dive in.

Jeffrey gives us an overview and demonstration of a continuous delivery environment and shows us some great tools along the way. Using integrated development and operations, he gets the most out of cloud technologies.

Ted explores this great open-source tool that performs OS-level virtualization and helps your system recognize changes in code.

Learn how to use XP (eXtreme Programming) techniques to improve the way you deliver softwareIn my book, "eXtreme .NET," I introduce a team of developers who are learning how to improve their ability to deliver great software. In this article, you'll follow this team as they learn about a new tool to help them develop software solutions using the .NET Framework. The tool they are going to explore is called Cruise Control and it helps the team continuously integrate their code.

Punit explores the necessary detail of testing and a useful collection of tools that you can employ. His advice ensures not only that your code runs as designed, but that the testing process is as painless as possible.

Git has some similarities to Subversion, but it’s in the differences that Git shines. Derick looks at some of the features that Git provides, for which Subversion has no equivalent.

Continuous Integration might seem like a lot of cooks stirring the same pot, but Geoff shows us how it’s more like a community of mentors.

Jeffrey takes a look at the state of the industry and comes up with some interesting ways to measure efficiency and accuracy.

If your application uses multi-threading, immutability should be part of it. John covers how to enforce and work with immutable objects, despite C#’s lack of native support for them.

Every system needs to be tested before being set loose on an unsuspecting public. Keith uses Coverage.py to figure out how much information about code is enough, and what kinds of statistics and measurements can make you confident that your work will endure whatever a user throws at it.

Insufficient testing can lead to devastating results. Find out what you can do to minimize outages as Keith explores unit testing using a Python tool called Coverage.py.

Martin introduces Design by Contract and Code Contracts, and gives you a sneak preview of Pex—Microsoft’s new test-suite generator. Along the way, he will show you how to add contracts to ADO.NET entities and some interesting coding strategies, good practices, and pitfalls you may encounter while making a deal with your code.With Code Contracts, Microsoft delivers its own flavor of Design by Contract for the .NET Framework. But wait, what is this thing sometimes called C...ontract-First Development? How will it change the way you develop software and write your unit tests? And first and foremost, how do you use Code Contracts efficiently?In this article, I will introduce Design by Contract and Code Contracts, as well as give you a sneak preview of Pex-Microsoft’s new test-suite generator. Along the way, I will show you how to add contracts to ADO.NET entities and some interesting coding strategies, good practices, and pitfalls you may encounter while making a deal with your code.See More

Scrum is an agile software development process to manage software projects. Scrum is based on three simple principles: visible progress, constant inspection, and adaptation. With Scrum, teams use an empirical approach to adapt to changing requirements and priorities. Teams using Scrum focus on delivering working software to their customers on a frequent basis.

Jan/Feb 08 Editorial by Rod Paddock

Your manager just dropped into your office and said, “We have a very important, new assignment with a limited budget and tight schedule. I am assigning you to be the project manager. Good luck.”Your manager turns and leaves your office. After your heart rate subsides, you start to think about your new assignment. How shall I proceed? What tools will I use? What are my deliverables? One of the most challenging roles in the Information Technology industry is that of Projec...t Manager (PM). PMs are delegated a great deal of responsibility but with often little authority. In this article, you will learn valuable skills and tools that you can apply to become a good project manager and add value to your company.See More

Everything right or wrong with a software project is management’s fault.Either management staffed the right people or the wrong people. Management was absent or involved. Management is hard, and there are numerous factors that can cause success or failure of a project. In the best situation you have great people who do great work. A software manager can even succeed despite themselves if they happen to staff a top-notch team even though the managers, themselves, might no...t be very competent. The success that a top-notch team achieves is still the manager’s fault. Failure, however, is harder to blame on the team because a manager must be able to solve problems as they come along. This article will focus on tips and knowledge to use when managing an agile software project.See More

It is often said that ASP.NET MVC was inspired by Rails. What better way to test that assertion than by writing the Nerd Dinner ASP.NET MVC application in Rails? In this article, I’ll take you through the steps I used to get Nerd Dinner up and running in Rails. A few points to keep in mind:

You might have heard about Node.js and always wanted to try it. With Ben’s guidance, you can get a simple Node.js app up and running, and learn about some other useful tools as you go.

Rod continues the tale of an enormous conversion project.

Rod's big project is drawing to a close, and it's time to consider User Acceptance Testing.

When Microsoft first released the Entity Framework, agile developers roundly criticized it. These developers hold the tenets of domain-driven development and testability very high. The classes generated from the Entity Data Model (EDM) are very tightly bound to the Entity Framework APIs by either inheriting from the EntityObject or implement interfaces that allow the classes to participate in change tracking and relationship management.

First Premier Bankcard (www.firstpremier.com) is the 10th largest issuer of Visa and MasterCard credit cards in the United States.First Premier employs multiple thousands of people spread across the state of South Dakota. A major percentage of the employees at First Premier work in call-center operations helping people apply for credit cards.

Jimmy explores what went right and what went wrong with version 1.0 of AutoMapper.

Derick outlines how to achieve the benefits of low coupling, high cohesion, and strong encapsulation. He also shows how the five S.O.L.I.D. design principles can get you there.Most professional software developers understand the academic definitions of coupling, cohesion, and encapsulation.However, many developers do not understand how to achieve the benefits of low coupling, high cohesion and strong encapsulation, as outlined in this article. Fortunately, others have cr...eated stepping stones that lead to these goals, resulting in software that is easier to read, easier to understand and easier to change. In this article series, I will define three of the primary object-oriented principles and show how to reach them through the five S.O.L.I.D. design principles.See More

Continuous integration (CI) has stood as one of the core pillars of the movement to agile software development best practices during the past decade.

When I started my company Attachments.me three years ago, NoSQL was a hot topic. Advocates preached impressive benefits:

We seem to be an industry enamored with buzz words. Even though XmlHttpRequest has been around since the mid-90s, mainstream programmers didn’t give it a second thought until someone attached the term AJAX to it. The same is true for the never-ending quest to put as many different words as we can in front of “driven-development.” Another term that hit the scene in recent years is dependency injection.

It’s so new that the dust is still settling, and VS2017 was worth the wait. Markus explores the ins and outs of his favorite new features.

If you thought that pages and dialogs that need a response from a user couldn’t be unit tested, John will show you how it’s done using dependency inversion.

Everyone’s familiar with the status lights that movie-makers think indicate that a computer (or bank of computers) is thinking. Eric tells us how to use real status lights to indicate failure and success—and progress—of your apps using Z-Wave.