Agile Otter Blog

Agile's teaching of "thin, vertical slices" doesn't apply just to features. Organizations move forward in thin vertical slices too. Story mapping teaches us to do incremental, value-first programming and integrate the "threads of functions" all the time from end-to-end.  CI teaches us that integrating thin slices frequently avoids pre-release integration nightmares (and post-release nightmares).  Likewise, we leave room for learning and growing, because what we learn in iteration N may give us different options and opportunities in iteration N+1 and onward. We have an idea of where we want to go, but we are always seeking best value. However, too few agile transitions are done in an agile way. It's only reasonable that a pre-agile company would want a waterfall, Big-Design-Up-Front plan with staffing and milestones for an agile transition. But we, as post-transition coaches and consultants know better and are supposed to be ...

This week, and last, we are doing our work in the release candidate (RC) branch, which will eventually be merged to trunk. We maintain a "stable trunk" system, with the RC as our codeline (for now). This is an intermediate step on our way to continuous integration. Partly because of the change in version control, the team has learned to rely more upon the tests, and is writing them quickly. We have had a noticeable increase in both unit tests (UTs) and automated user acceptance tests (UATs) in only one week There were some problems with people checking in code for which some tests did not pass, but they have learned very quickly that this is quite unwelcome. We are painfully aware of the time it takes to run both test suites. The UTs suffer from a common testability problem, in that they were written to use the database and they sometimes tend to be subsystem tests rather than truly unit tests. When they are scoped down and mocking is applied, they should be much faster...