Agile Software Development Quotes

Perhaps you thought that “getting it working” was the first order of business for a professional developer. I hope by now, however, that this book has disabused you of that idea. The functionality that you create today has a good chance of changing in the next release, but the readability of your code will have a profound effect on all the changes that will ever be made.

Celebrate Successes, but Don't Declare Victory

Suppose a developer has a conversation with a customer about details of a feature. The conversation should not be considered complete until it is expressed as a customer test.

It is a myth that we can get systems “right the first time.” Instead, we should implement only today’s stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow. This is the essence of iterative and incremental agility. Test-driven development, refactoring, and the clean code they produce make this work at the code level.

There is really no bad software development process. There is only how you are doing it today and better.

To focus on the visible at the expense of the essential is irresponsible.

It may seem like writing tests slows down development; in fact, testing does not cost, it pays, both during development and over the system’s lifecycle.

Agile is simple—it just isn’t easy.

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test.” —Ray Ozzie, CTO, Microsoft Corporation

Code formatting is about communication, and communication is the professional developer’s first order of business.

It is not enough for code to work. Code that works is often badly broken. Programmers who satisfy themselves with merely working code are behaving unprofessionally. They may fear that they don’t have time to improve the structure and design of their code, but I disagree. Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code.

Code formatting is important. It is too important to ignore and it is too important to treat religiously. Code formatting is about communication, and communication is the professional developer’s first order of business.

Clean code can be read, and enhanced by a developer other than its original author. It has unit and acceptance tests. It has meaningful names. It provides one way rather than many ways for doing one thing. It has minimal dependencies, which are explicitly defined, and provides a clear and minimal API. Code should be literate since depending on the language, not all necessary information can be expressed clearly in code alone. -Dave Thomas, founder of OTI, godfather of the Eclipse strategy

Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code. Bad schedules can be redone, bad requirements can be redefined. Bad team dynamics can be repaired. But bad code rots and ferments, becoming an inexorable weight that drags the team down.

agile development reflects a product lifecycle approach (continuous delivery of value), rather than a project approach (begin-end). While an individual release of a product can be managed as a project, an agile approach views a release as a single stage in a product’s ongoing evolution.

The majority of the cost of a software project is in long-term maintenance. In order to minimize the potential for defects as we introduce change, it’s critical for us to be able to understand what a system does. As systems become more complex, they take more and more time for a developer to understand, and there is an ever greater opportunity for a misunderstanding. Therefore, code should clearly express the intent of its author. The clearer the author can make the code, the less time others will have to spend understanding it. This will reduce defects and shrink the cost of maintenance.

Recommended Reading The Definitive Guide to Getting Your Budget Approved by Johannes Ritter and Frank Röttgers provides a systematic guide for creating a financial business case. The book includes examples as well as the methods for using Monte Carlo simulation and sensitivity analysis to create the business case. The methods described in the book can also be used for quantifying risks and project costs. Mary and Tom Poppendieck in their book Lean Software Development: describe the lean principles and the types of waste in software projects.

Countering the juggernaut of formalism is a minority worldview of equal historical standing, even though it does not share equal awareness or popularity. Variously known as hermeneutics, constructivism, interpretationalism, and most recently postmodernism, this tradition has consistently challenged almost everything advanced by the formalists. Iterative development practices, including XP, and object thinking are consistent with the hermeneutic worldview. Unfortunately, most object, XP, and agile practitioners are unaware of this tradition and its potential for providing philosophical support and justification for their approach to software development.

Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the quantity of work-in-progress. Give team members a better life through an improved work/life balance. Provide slack in the system by balancing demand against throughput. Provide a simple prioritization mechanism that delays commitment and keeps options open. Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement. Strive for a process that enables predictable results, business agility, good governance, and the development of what the Software Engineering Institute calls a high-maturity organization.

I would compare a project with a country, which is either properly regulated by the laws or enslaved by a dictator whom everybody is supposed to love. What modern management is doing in most companies is the latter scenario. They expect us to love the customer and work just because of that. There are no laws, no discipline, no regulations, and no principle, because, like every dictator, they simply are not competent enough in creating them. Dictators just capture the power and rule by the force: it's much easier than building a system of laws, which will work by itself. The management in software projects also can't create a proper management system, since they simply don't have enough knowledge for that. Instead, they expect our love. Isn't it obvious that rather soon that love turns into hate and we quit or the project collapses?

When applying agile practices at the portfolio level, similar benefits accrue: • Demonstrable results—Every quarter or so products, or at least deployable pieces of products, are developed, implemented, tested, and accepted. Short projects deliver chunks of functionality incrementally. • Customer feedback—Each quarter product managers review results and provide feedback, and executives can view progress in terms of working products. • Better portfolio planning—Portfolio planning is more realistic because it is based on deployed whole or partial products. • Flexibility—Portfolios can be steered toward changing business goals and higher-value projects because changes are easy to incorporate at the end of each quarter. Because projects produce working products, partial value is captured rather than being lost completely as usually happens with serial projects that are terminated early. • Productivity—There is a hidden productivity improvement with agile methods from the work not done. Through constant negotiation, small projects are both eliminated and pared down.

Over the span of a year or two, teams that were moving very fast at the beginning of a project can find themselves moving at a snail’s pace. Every change they make to the code breaks two or three other parts of the code. As productivity decreases, management does the only thing they can; they add more staff to the project to increase productivity. But that new staff is not versed in the design of the system. Furthermore, they, and everyone else on the team, are under horrific pressure to increase productivity. So they all make more and more messes, driving productivity further toward zero. Eventually the team rebels. They inform management that they cannot continue to develop in this odious code base. Management does not want to expend resources on a whole new redesign of the project, but they cannot deny that productivity is terrible. Eventually, they bend to the demands of the developers and authorize the grand redesign in the sky. A new tiger team is selected. Everyone wants to be on this team because it’s a green-field project. They get to start over and create something wonderful. But only the best and brightest are chosen for the tiger team. Everyone else must continue to maintain the current system. Now the two teams are in a race. The tiger team must build a new system that does everything that the old system does. Management will not replace the old system until the new system can do everything that the old system does. This race can go on for a very long time. I’ve seen it take 10 years. And by the time it’s done, the original members of the tiger team are long gone, and the current members are demanding that the new system be redesigned because it’s such a mess.

Can’t we do better with Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software?

the critical factor in motivation is not measurement,8 but empowerment: moving decisions to the lowest possible level in an organization while developing the capacity of those people to make decisions wisely.

Mike had explained that agile software development, intentional community, and group dynamics had emerged from a single pool of primordial psychological research and indigenous traditions.

believe that this is simpler than it sounds. It is about identifying the obstacles in our way and taking today’s best-practice ideas—those found in the Agile Manifesto and in books like Lean Startup, Lean Software Development, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and others on today’s management bookshelves—and applying them to IT leadership.

We’re all doing the same thing — getting stuff done. We work together to make it happen, and we jump back and forth between all the normal development activities as the situation dictates.

In the previous two decades, as NUMMI’s success had become better known, executives in other industries had started adapting the Toyota Production System philosophy to other industries. In 2001, a group of computer programmers had gathered at a ski lodge in Utah to write a set of principles, called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” that adapted Toyota’s methods and lean manufacturing to how software was created.

If you are going to use automated testing and Continuous Integration (CI) to dramatically improve your productivity, you need to treat your testing investments as being at least as important, or even more important, than your development investments, which is a big cultural change for most organizations. In

Arguing on the Internet is a complete and utter waste of time and energy. It is futile and illogical. Yet, despite being a category of people who rely on their keen sense of logic, software developers often argue on the Internet.

Contrast this to the more traditional model where Development and Test teams are assigned to a “project” and then reassigned to another project as soon as the project is completed and funding runs out. This leads to all sorts of undesired outcomes, including developers being unable to see the long-term consequences of decisions they make (a form of feedback) and a funding model that only values and pays for the earliest stages of the software life cycle—which, tragically, is also the least expensive part for successful products or services. ††

Only by repeatedly accepting failure and subsequently purging its causes from the system you can steadily grow a software project and allow it to perform successfully.

Agile software development needs teams to be motivated. But repetitive tasks are boring, not motivating, so they should be automated. Many

Software is produced in short time frames, often in time boxes or “sprints,” and delivered in many incremental releases, where each release is a potentially shippable product.

If you want people to take your advice, you need to solve more problems than you create.

In this tech-savvy world, the enhancement of globalization is changing our life very fast. However, you owe a small or large business; the use of the software is making our business simple yet. It helps us to manage our business effectively and reach great heights of success. Like many other software development companies around the world, Tech Dyno BD offers a software development service that helps your business or organization stay innovation-oriented, agile, and effective in managing company values best.

Small batches create speed, flexibility and responsiveness for software projects.

In software development, user stories can deliver direct user value independently

These scrums provide opportunities for problems to surface and for a team member who’s overloaded to get help from another team member. Software teams benefit from meeting every day because their batches (user stories) are small enough to require daily coordination.

Agile development is an approach to software development that emerged in the late 1990’s from a collection of ideas about how to make software development more lightweight, flexible, and incremental; it was formally defined during a meeting of practitioners in 2001.

Meaningful work has social value. The software development that enables meaningful work is by extension meaningful work in and of itself.

Despite using the latest agile software development methods, the team had created the biggest waste of all: building a product no one wanted.

software development is full of unknowns; uncertainty and risk go hand in hand with innovation.

In software development the primary measure of progress has to be working software that meets the needs of the end users.

Recommended Reading Mike Cohn Agile Estimating and Planning provides guidance on iteration planning, including estimating the effort for user stories. David J. Anderson Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business provides the guidance, definitions, and metric calculations necessary to establish an efficient software development flow, including establishing WIP limits.

software development is full of unknowns;

Most literature on the subject of agile methodology... is written from the viewpoint of software developers and programmers, and tends to place its main emphasis on programming techniques and agile project management—testing is usually only mentioned in the guise of unit testing and its associated tools. ...However, unit tests alone are not sufficient and broader-based testing is critical to the success of agile development processes.

if we establish something as the “best possible way, the motivation for kaizen [continuous incremental improvement] will be gone

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Agile software development is a social activity.

David Anderson’s Agile Management put newly minted Agile teams on notice that they would eventually be treated like the businesses that they are and held accountable

Scrum can also be useful as a starting point for an experienced Agile team to evolve into a Leaner process.

Worse yet is the rejection of upfront requirements. The basic observation is correct: requirements will change, and are hard anyway to capture at the beginning. In no way, however, does it imply the dramatic conclusion that upfront requirements are useless! What it does imply is that requirements should be subject to change, like all other artifacts on the software process. [...] The agile advice here is irresponsible and serious software projects should ignore it.The sound practice is to start collecting requirements at the beginning, produce a provisional version prior to engaging in design, and treat the requirements as a living product that undergoes constant adaptation throughout the project.

The Scrum idea of a separated Scrum Master is good for Scrum, but not appropriate for most projects. Good development requires not just talkers but doers.

Anyone who practices ad hoc development under the guise of agile methods is an imposter.

accurately setting and managing expectations.

following a [software development] process as agile as a cashier on Quaaludes.

The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day.

a software architect who codes is a more effective and happier architect

Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of successful software yet it’s frustratingly neglected by many teams.

Non-functional requirements” not sounding cool isn’t a reason to neglect them.

developers are likely to ignore your coding experience if you’re not programming on the project

Unlike the medieval building industry though, the software development industry lacks an explicit way for people to progress from being junior developers through to software architects. We don’t have a common apprenticeship model.

organisations often tend to see software architecture as a rank rather than a role too

As a verb, architecture (i.e. the process, architecting) is about understanding what you need to build, creating a vision for building it and making the appropriate design decisions. All of this needs to be based upon requirements because requirements drive architecture.

No one has yet figured out how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led,” wrote John Kotter

As a noun then, architecture can be summarised as being about structure. It’s about the decomposition of a product into a collection of components/modules and interactions.

You don’t need to be the best coder on the team

As an Agile software development team, we’d been following the hallowed eXtreme Programming tenets, including YAGNI. That is, You Aren’t Gonna Need It: a caution to not write unnecessary code —

It is much more important to develop people with the expertise to make wise decisions than it is to develop decision-making processes that purportedly think for people. We are also convinced that it is quite possible to develop many people who are able to make wise intuitive decisions.

it is easier to change a decision that hasn’t been made.

Software rarely comes with a warranty.

Set-based development means that you communicate constraints, not solutions.

resist the temptation to jump to a solution;

The simple mathematical fact working here is that variation is always amplified as it moves down a chain of connected events. A little variation in step one introduces a huge variation five steps later.

However, if damaging behavior can be limited through the relationship rather than the contract, all manner of benefits in terms of speed, flexibility, cost, and information exchange can result. Unfortunately, these benefits are counterintuitive

Thus, fixed-price contracts tend to select the vendor most likely to get in trouble.

There are few endeavors in which it is more important to keep options open than in software development. In Chapter 3, “Decide as Late as Possible

premature design commitment is a design failure mode

Frameworks should be extracted from a collection of successful implementations, not built on speculation.

In a three-year period, we had 78 projects, and 77 of them were delivered on time, on budget, and in scope. Then I surveyed the customers and found out that none of them was happy!

He notes that the policies established to solve a problem will often exacerbate the problem, creating a downward spiral: As a problem gets worse, managers apply even more aggressively the very policies that are causing the problem.

A Standish Group study found that 45 percent of features in a typical system are never used and 19 percent are rarely used.

empowerment: moving decisions to the lowest possible level in an organization while developing the capacity of those people to make decisions wisely.

A mature organization focuses on learning effectively and empowers the people who do the work to make decisions.

keep the constraints of the problem visible

Software rarely comes with a warranty. Let’s

Focusing exclusively on local measurements has a tendency to inhibit collaboration beyond the area being measured, because there is no reward for it.

Resistance indicates a perceived threat to a largely unconscious belief system, one that has no doubt successfully guided the organization in the past.

because the belief system has no doubt led to success in the past, so it will fight back with many varieties of self-fulfilling prophecies.

and so we persist in using suboptimized measurements out of superstition and habit.

When you try to measure performance, particularly the performance of knowledge workers, you’re positively courting dysfunction.

If the vision of perceived integrity isn’t refreshed regularly, the engineers have a tendency to get lost in the technical details and forget the customer values.

It's possible to build successful software without being Agile - but it's far less likely and a lot less fun. My joys would be short-lived without ongoing customer collaboration. I would quit this field without iterative development. I would be living in a dream if I required signed off specifications before starting to develop.

with

I therefore believe that we will look back at the rise of the Agile brands being nothing more and nothing less than named collections of good practices as a crucial step in the evolution of software development.

after you have chosen an approach, you don’t need to worry about getting the advantages of that design because it will come naturally. Where you need to provide management focus is on addressing the disadvantages of your organizational choice.

Process is only a second-order effect. The unique people, their feelings and qualities, are more influential

It is important to remember that although it is relatively easy to write code, it is very difficult to create a sustainable platform.

Always trust that engineers are doing the best they know how or can in the situation. People want to do a good job;