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XP on Writing Software: Part 2

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Managing an Agile Team

University of Virginia

4.7 (527 ratings) | 24K Students Enrolled

Course 1 of 5 in the Agile Development Specialization

While agile has become the de facto standard for managing digital innovation teams, many wonder if they’re doing it ‘right’. Twitter is full of jokes about how teams say they do agile but don’t ‘really’ do it. The reality is that getting the most out of agile is less about observing specific procedures and more about how a team focuses and measures their progress. Rather than just boring you with an accounting of agile methodologies, this course focuses on helping you better charter your team’s focus, definition of success, and practice of agile. While learning about agile mainstays like Scrum, XP, and kanban, you’ll also learn to help your team ask the right questions about how they’re working and facilitate good answers on how agile can help. As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 20 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122) This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

Skills You'll Learn

agile product management, Agile Software Development, backlog management, Kanban, XP

Reviews

4.7 (527 ratings)

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SA

Jun 05, 2019

I've really enjoyed this course on Managing an Agile Team. Comprehensive with a mix of insights from industry experts, case studies and great instructions on best practices from Alex.

DB

Aug 01, 2017

This is an interesting course that provides critical information regarding collaboration with key stakeholders outside the scrum team. I use lessons learned in the course daily.

From the lesson

Building, Managing, and Introducing

This week we’ll dive into the jobs of building software and the core management jobs in running an agile team. Agile--and XP in particular--offers a rich body of work on specific coding practices. We’ll step through a few of the most prominent and discuss key linkages with the other concepts and practices you’ve learned. On the job of managing, we’ll dive deeper into what that means and what works in an agile context. We’ll close with ideas and case studies for introducing (or reintroducing) agile to your organization.

Building Software with Agile4:21

XP on Writing Software: Part 19:29

XP on Writing Software: Part 23:32

Bill Wake on YAGNI6:31

Bill Wake on Integrated QA3:32

Taught By

Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow

Transcript

All right, back to the Java building and how XP can help you do it better. Here are a couple of last practices, the Ten Minute Build and Continuous Integration. Continuous Integration refers to this idea that developers will check out versions of the code, make their changes, add stuff, do whatever they're working on at the moment, and then those things will all have to be merged back together and built. And it'll all have to work again. And the fact that you should do this continuously a lot, because if you have a lot of unmerged code, you may find, days later, that there's conflicts. These things don't make sense together. And you're going to have generated a lot of waste and need for rework. So if you do this very constantly, then, one, developers don't have to worry as much that, ghee, this might make a problem with somebody else's code, and they'll just, boom, integrate it together, see, and if it does, they fix it. And two, those problems won't accrue as much size if you're doing this a lot, is what XP would say about this. And you've heard Spotify talk about how everything's in automation, so that they can do this. They, Continuous Integration will generally run a set of batch processes that take the code, build it into whatever form it needs to be in to be kind of working software, and then run a bunch of tests against it. Unit tests, as well as, functional tests. Let's talk about that for a minute. A unit test we talked about, this is a kind of lower level, where we're testing individual pieces of code, and then, up above that, we have this idea of functional tests. And these test the system as a whole after you put all the code together. And, typically, a build process will run this all and build the software, run all the unit tests, and then once the softwares put together, it'll run these functional tests. And automating that means that you can do it a lot and find the problems quickly and fix them. So the idea of the Ten Minute Build, which is kind of a corollary to this, is that you should put things together so that it can run in ten minutes, and because that facilitates you being able to do it a lot and not having it take too long. So, this is something that you will, I think consistently hear from high functioning Agile teams. Is that all the kind of testing and build, that's all automated. Even sometimes putting up test environments, and related things like that. And we'll talk more about that in Course 4. But they've invested in automation. So there's a tedious task that a developer or a tester is obliged to do, they look to automate that early and then accrue that investment, add to it over time, so that they are able to integrate a lot, test a lot, and see how things are working before. Whereas, the sort of counter example or counter case there is that it's really hard to get everything put together and working. Releases are infrequent and kind of a big mess and generate a lot of overhead. And that's a case where XP would say, we focus on automation. Invest in this and your practice of Agile will become healthier. So we've talked about the Java building. And even if you're not a software developer or even if that's not your job now in your team, I hope you've learned enough to make room for these practices, and introduce them to your team, so that they can decide if and which ones of those they want to apply, in what way. And then you can help them integrate that into your overall practice of Agile in a way that helps the team improve and become more productive.

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