Agile development: the way to efficient software development (study Note 1)

At present, many companies are implementing or requiring developers to"Agile R & D practices", What is agile development?

We have all seen or experienced projects that fail due to redundant, cumbersome, and complicated development processes. There should be a better method of software development in the world: focus only on things that really matter and focus less on things that take up a lot of time and do not matter. Its Academic name isAgility.

Agile development is a development method that is people-oriented, team-based, rapid response to changes, and can work with software.

Declaration of agile development:

1. Individuals and interactions are better than processes and tools

2. Workable software is better than comprehensive documents

3. Customer collaboration is better than contract negotiation

4. Responding to changes is better than following the plan

Agile Methods can quickly respond to changes. It emphasizes teamwork and people focus on specific feasible goals to achieve truly workable software.The spirit of agile development.

It requires everyone in the team (including those who work with the Team) to be professional and actively expect the project to succeed. It does not require everyone to be experienced professionals, but must have a professional attitude: everyone wants to do their jobs as much as possible.

This means that we cannot perform tests at the end of the project. We will not perform system integration at the end of the month, nor stop collecting requests and feedback when coding. On the contrary, these activities run through the entire project lifecycle. As a matter of fact, as long as someone continues to use this software, development will not really end. We are engaged in continuous development and continuous feedback. We don't need to wait several months to discover the problem: the sooner we find the problem, the easier it will be to fix it. So we should fix it at this moment.

This isKey Points of agile development.

This idea of continuous development is rooted in agile methods. It not only applies to the life cycle of software development, but also to the learning of technical skills, requirement collection, product deployment, and user training. It includes all activities in various aspects of software development.

Agile development is to constantly adjust and improve using feedback in a highly collaborative environment.

What kind of work and lifestyle should agile teams adopt?

First, it requires the entire team to work together. An agile team is usually a small team, or a large team is divided into several small teams (about 10 members ). All members of the team work together. If possible, it is best to have an independent workspace, share code and necessary development tasks together, and work together most of the time. Working closely with customers or software users, and demonstrating the latest system as early and frequently as possible.

We need to constantly get feedback from our own code, and use automatic optimization tools to continuously build (continuous integration) and test systems. As we move forward, we will be aware of modifying some code: while the functions remain unchanged, We will design some code to improve the code quality. This is the so-calledReconstructionIt is an indispensable part of software development. Programming never really ends ".

ToIterationWork: determine a small piece of time (about a week), and then finish them on time. Demonstrate the work results of each iteration to the customer and get their feedback in a timely manner. This ensures the correct direction and allows users to publish system versions as frequently as possible based on actual conditions.