agile

There’s a lot of buzz in the agile world today about becoming more technical, automating everything, and learning the next miracle tool. While it’s important to establish a process, and tools can help with many steps of the software development lifecycle, the human contribution to project delivery is still the most important. Here are some qualities agile teams should encourage.

Test plans are essential for communicating intent and requirements for testing efforts, but excessive documentation creates confusion—or just goes unread. Try the 5W2H method. The name comes from the seven questions you ask: why, what, where, when, who, how, and how much. That's all you need to provide valuable feedback and develop a sufficient plan of action.

Just as you should not take out a financial loan without having a plan to pay it back, you should also have a plan when incurring technical debt. The most important thing is to have transparency—adequate tracking and visibility of the debt. Armed with the knowledge of these pending tasks, the team can devise a strategy for when and how to “pay off” technical debt.

People at Ben Kopel's organization were interested in improving their code health. It was something the engineers had control over and leadership didn't need to be involved, so code health was a great candidate for a self-organized initiative. Ben details the meeting they held, their discussions and plans, and how an agile team empowered themselves to improve.