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Tacking toward agility


By Larry O'Brien
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May 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)


If you put a newcomer into a sailboat, give them the tiller and the mainsheet, and tell them to sail upwind, the most likely outcome is that they’ll sail backward. Sailors never tire of talking about making boats go faster and the million different variables that contribute to boat speed. However, you don’t need to know anything about rigging tension and sail shape in order to get moving. You just need to know some basic constraints and rules about positioning the boat and the sail relative to the wind. You might not win races, but you’ll be sailing.

Similarly, for all of the columns we write about fine-tuning approaches to design and architecture, tool choice and process improvement, there are really only a few crucial things that you must take care of in order to start moving forward in software development. Sure, there are teams that seem to do everything right: daily stand-up meetings held as they do 40 minutes of cardiovascular exercise, pair programming while sitting with perfect posture, flossing after every code check-in, and so forth. Most of us, though, struggle with less-than-perfect teams, hoping that the things we are skimping on aren’t the critical ones. These things define our culture and determine the type of programmers who are likely to end up working with us over the long term.

Professional development begins with source control. It’s astonishing to me, but I not infrequently encounter teams that use FTP and e-mail to move development files around. This is simply unacceptable and will immediately “flip the bozo bit” in any kind of skeptic.

In the past few years, the OSS Subversion software has become very common, but I’ve recently become skeptical that it’s a good match for newcomers to version control. While I’ve never lost any data in Subversion, it seems to get into faulty states (“wedged”) fairly often, especially when manipulating large numbers of files, which is done often when introducing a team to source control. While it’s generally easy for an experienced user to fix a Subversion error state, to a newcomer it can be off-putting. There are many choices, but I would suggest SourceGear Vault, Perforce and Visual Studio Team System as alternatives.



Related Search Term(s): Agile

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