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Questions tagged [agile]

Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development reads, in its entirety, as follows:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

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Further Reading

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I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. (It was…
kmote
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Why do we use story points instead of man days when estimating user stories?

In agile methodologies (e.g. SCRUM), the complexity/effort needed for user stories are measured in Story points. Story points are used to calculate how many user stories a team can take in an iteration. What is the advantage of introducing an…
Louis Rhys
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Agile for the Solo Developer

How would someone implement Agile process concepts as a solo developer? Agile seems useful for getting applications developed at a faster pace, but it also seems very team oriented...
kelleystar
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Relationship between user story, feature, and epic?

As someone who's still new to agile, I'm not sure I completely understand the relationship or difference between user story, feature, and epic. According to this question, a feature is a collection of stories. One of the answers suggests that a…
nivlam
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How do I deal with a counterproductive scrum team?

Backstory: I have been working as part of this team for the past three years and in this time we have had three different Scrum Master who have all run things differently. Because of this change in Scrum Masters and their way of running the show, it…
user42401
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Are deadlines Agile?

For clarity, a deadline is: A time limit or deadline is a narrow field of time, or particular point in time, by which an objective or task must be accomplished. From wikipedia My whole software development career I have been doing "Agile" which…
stevebot
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Does Scrum turn active developers into passive developers?

I'm a web developer working in a team of three developers and one designer. It's now about five months that we've implemented the agile scrum software development methodology. But I have a weird feeling I just wanted to share in this site. One…
Saeed Neamati
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Where should my team start with becoming "modern"?

I'm a relatively new developer, fresh from college. While in college and during subsequent job-seeking, I realized that there were a lot of "modern" software development methodologies that my education was lacking: unit testing, logging, database…
WannabeCoder
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Is a large increase in velocity realistic in a Scrum environment?

My manager has recently really been pushing to use velocity as a target and measure of productivity. We are currently working at an average velocity of 50 story points. My manager wants us to increase it by 40% to 70 story points (with no increase…
P2l
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Is Agile the new micromanagement?

This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a…
Smith James
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Dealing with failed sprints and deadlines

Many Scrum books and articles say that a failed sprint (when the team fails to complete some features from the Sprint Backlog) is not something that bad, it happens from time to time, and it can actually be useful if the team learns from their…
Andre Borges
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Why is agile all about the test-driven development (TDD) and not development-driven test (DDT)?

So I am new to agile, but not test-driven development. My professors in college were all about the idea of tests then code then tests. I am not sure I understand why. From my perspective it is a lot of upfront cost that will most likely be changed…
nerdlyist
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Is the agile approach too much of a convenient excuse for cowboys

I believe that an agile approach is best for projects where the requirements are fuzzy and a lot of interaction is required to help shape the end user's ideas. However... In my professional work, I keep ending up at companies where an "agile"…
sipsorcery
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Can Agile/Scrum be used by 1 or 2 developers?

Everything I've been reading and researching up to this point describes how Agile/Scrum works great with teams of about 4 to 6 members, maybe even more. In my current shop, we have about 8 developers or so, but given the nature of the volume of…
Dillie-O
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When does pair programming work? When to avoid it?

Rather than slavishly pair program all the time, we use pair programming selectively on our team. I think it works best in the following circumstances: Ramping up brand new team members on a project (instead of letting them wade through…
Paddyslacker
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