Agile Software Development

Project evaluations (or retrospectives) are a nuisance. Everybody knows they are important, but nobody performs them. With at least ten new projects starting every week in our company, how can I instruct our people to get all project stakeholders together (in ten different settings) and construct a "lessons learned" list of the ten projects that were delivered the week before? Nobody is available for such meetings because they are all too busy making sure the new projects are initiated properly. Sure, this is no excuse. But it is reality.

Automate the Process
To get around this problem I have decided to automate the evaluation process.

A colleague of mine lately asked me what would be the most important C++ IDE features for supporting the agile software development. While agile processes are more about people and interaction, than about the tools, a decent tool support certainly makes things easier. Here is a list of things I would value in the agile-aware C++ IDE in the order of decreasing priority.

1. Command-line repeatability
Agile methods see the high levels of automation of a ‘mechanical’ and repetitive tasks as a relief for the developers and help to reduce errors.

The biggest difference of agile methods from traditional waterfall is the short feedback loop. The whole concept of agility in essence is no more, than "build the most important piece, evaluate, adjust, and repeat". Automated tests in the agile methods serve as a very important tool for shortening the feedback loop.

In the most of traditional processes automated tests are mimicking the manual test procedures. The tests are often written not by the code developers. Tests usually involve testing the functionality of the whole system. Test results come to the original developers quite late and tests don't take into account the latest code changes. Automating functional and system tests is a good thing. It makes testing a little easier, more effective and saves some money for the company. However, it is no more, than automating a small piece of the manual labor.