Essential Skills For The Agile Developer

Agile has become today’s dominant software development paradigm, but agile methods remain difficult to measure and improve. Essential Skills for the Agile Developer fills this gap from the bottom up, teaching proven techniques for assessing and optimizing both individual and team agile practices. Written by four principals of Net Objectives—one of the world’s leading agile training and consulting firms—this book reflects their unsurpassed experience helping organizations transition to agile. It focuses on the specific actions and insights that can deliver the greatest design and programming improvements with economical investment. The authors reveal key factors associated with successful agile projects and offer practical ways to measure them. Through actual examples, they address principles, attitudes, habits, technical practices, and design considerations—and above all, show how to bring all these together to deliver higher-value software. Using the authors’ techniques, managers and teams can optimize the whole organization and the whole product across its entire lifecycle. Essential Skills for the Agile Developer shows how to Perform programming by intention Separate use from construction Consider testability before writing code Avoid over- and under-design Succeed with Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) Minimize complexity and rework Use encapsulation more effectively and systematically Know when and how to use inheritance Prepare for change more successfully Perform continuous integration more successfully Master powerful best practices for design and refactoring

Agile Development, in particular, eXtreme Programming (XP), has been gaining a lot of momentum because it can effectively address the problems plaguing software development. In 2002, we, the Macau Productivity and Technology Center (CPTTM), started to hold courses on XP and OO design to teach the skills in agile development. At the beginning, we hired a well known software training and consulting company to teach. While the instructor was very professional and instructive and the feedbacks from the students were very good, the students didn't acquire the skills taught. We knew that it was because the concepts involved were abstract and it needed far more exercises for the students to practice in order to acquire the skills. Therefore, we decided to develop our enhanced training materials. In particular, we selected only 20% of the skills in agile development that deliver 80% of the value, while ignoring those useful but non-essential skills. Then we explained these skills in terms of examples and added a lot of real world examples as exercises. After adopting this set of materials, the new students really acquired the skills taught. Now we have organized the training materials into a book: Essential Skills for Agile Development. This book covers the essential skills in: OO design, Test Driven Development (TDD), team development, planning, communication and pair programming.

Discover the keys to seamless project management with the "Agile Scrum Guidebook," your comprehensive resource for mastering the principles and practices of Agile Scrum. Whether you're new to Agile methodologies or seeking to refine your existing Scrum skills, this guidebook offers a structured approach to implementing Scrum in projects of any scale. From the foundational concepts to advanced strategies for scaling Scrum across large teams, each chapter presents in-depth insights and practical advice to enhance your mastery of this dynamic framework. Dive into detailed exploration of roles, responsibilities, and the collaborative dynamics essential for Scrum success. Master the art of creating and managing the product backlog, planning and executing sprints with precision, and ensuring quality through rigorous testing and reviews. Learn to effectively monitor progress with burndown charts and Scrum boards, and adapt Scrum practices to meet the challenges of large-scale projects. Featuring case studies and real-world examples, the "Agile Scrum Guidebook" equips you with the tools and techniques to foster a productive, agile culture within your team or organization. Navigate the complexities of adopting Scrum with confidence, avoiding common pitfalls and leveraging best practices for optimal outcomes. Elevate your leadership and coaching skills to guide your teams towards achieving their highest potential. With its straightforward, practical approach, the "Agile Scrum Guidebook" is an essential read for software developers, project managers, product owners, Scrum masters, and anyone involved in the agile development process. Unlock the secrets to implementing effective, efficient Scrum practices and take your project management skills to the next level.

Changing Software Development explains why software development is an exercise in change management and organizational intelligence. An underlying belief is that change is learning and learning creates knowledge. By blending the theory of knowledge management, developers and managers will gain the tools to enhance learning and change to accommodate new innovative approaches such as agile and lean computing. Changing Software Development is peppered with practical advice and case studies to explain how and why knowledge, learning and change are important in the development process. Today, managers are pre-occupied with knowledge management, organization learning and change management; while software developers are often ignorant of the bigger issues embedded in their work. This innovative book bridges this divide by linking the software world of technology and processes to the business world of knowledge, learning and change.

Master the Crucial Non -Technical Skills Every Software Architect Needs! Thousands of software professionals have the necessary technical qualifications to become architects, but far fewer have the crucial non-technical skills needed to get hired and succeed in this role. In today's agile environments, these "soft" skills have grown even more crucial to success as an architect. For many developers, however, these skills don't come naturally-and they're rarely addressed in formal training. Now, long-time software architect Dave Hendricksen helps you fill this gap, supercharge your organisational impact, and quickly move to the next level in your career. In 12 Essential Skills for Software Architects, Hendricksen begins by pinpointing the specific relationship, personal, and business skills that successful architects rely upon. Next, he presents proven methods for systematically developing and sharpening every one of these skills, from negotiation and leadership to pragmatism and vision. From start to finish, this book's practical insights can help you get the architect position you want-and thrive once you have it! The soft skills you need... ...and a coherent framework and practical methodology for mastering them! Relationship skills Leadership, politics, gracious behavior, communication, negotiation Personal skills Context switching, transparency, passion Business skills Pragmatism, vision, business knowledge, innovation

Understand the technical foundations, as well as the non-programming skills needed to be a successful full stack web developer. This book reveals the reasons why a truly successful full stack developer does more than write code. You will learn the principles of the topics needed to help a developer new to agile or full stack working—UX, project management, QA, product management, and more— all from the point of view of a developer. Covering these skills alongside the fundamentals and foundations of modern web development, rather than specifics of current technologies and frameworks (which can age quickly), all programming examples are given in the context of the web as it is in 2018. Although you need to feel comfortable working on code at the system, database, API, middleware or user interface level, depending on the task in hand, you also need to be able to deal with the big picture and the little details. The Full Stack Developer recognizes skills beyond the technical, and gives foundational knowledge of the wide set of skills needed in a modern software development team. What You'll Learn Plan your work including Agile vs Waterfall, tools, scrum, kanban and continuous delivery Translate UX into code: grids, component libraries and style guides Design systems and system architectures (microservices to monoliths) Review patterns for APIs (SOAP, AJAX, REST), defining API domains, patterns for REST APIs and more API goodnessStudy the various front-end design patterns you need to know Store data, what to consider for security, deployment, in production and more Who This Book Is For New graduates or junior developers who are transitioning to working as part of a larger team structure in a multi-disciplinary teams and developers previously focused on only front-end or back-end dev transitioning into full stack.

This is a comprehensive guide to Scrum for all (team members, managers, and executives). If you want to use Scrum to develop innovative products and services that delight your customers, this is the complete, single-source reference you've been searching for. This book provides a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary that can be used in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.

We're losing tens of billions of dollars a year on broken software, and great new ideas such as agile development and Scrum don't always pay off. But there's hope. The nine software development practices in Beyond Legacy Code are designed to solve the problems facing our industry. Discover why these practices work, not just how they work, and dramatically increase the quality and maintainability of any software project. These nine practices could save the software industry. Beyond Legacy Code is filled with practical, hands-on advice and a common-sense exploration of why technical practices such as refactoring and test-first development are critical to building maintainable software. Discover how to avoid the pitfalls teams encounter when adopting these practices, and how to dramatically reduce the risk associated with building software--realizing significant savings in both the short and long term. With a deeper understanding of the principles behind the practices, you'll build software that's easier and less costly to maintain and extend. By adopting these nine key technical practices, you'll learn to say what, why, and for whom before how; build in small batches; integrate continuously; collaborate; create CLEAN code; write the test first; specify behaviors with tests; implement the design last; and refactor legacy code. Software developers will find hands-on, pragmatic advice for writing higher quality, more maintainable, and bug-free code. Managers, customers, and product owners will gain deeper insight into vital processes. By moving beyond the old-fashioned procedural thinking of the Industrial Revolution, and working together to embrace standards and practices that will advance software development, we can turn the legacy code crisis into a true Information Revolution.