Introduction to Scrum

My article Introduction to Scrum has been published in the May/June 2008 issue of CoDe magazine.

As I said in this article:

"Scrum is an agile process to manage software development projects.
Scrum is not prescriptive on engineering practices,
but rather it is a lightweight framework based on a few (common sense) guidelines for managing projects."

This issue of CoDe is dedicated to Agile Development.

Jeffrey Palermo has an interesting article on managing agile software projects that starts with quite a line:

"Everything right or wrong with a software project is management's fault"

Jeff then goes to talk about the fallacy of fixed scope, the unspoken quality variable, hiring and firing, managing the customer, and other areas where management needs to act and how this is done in an agile project.

Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo provides a list of 16 steps to improve your development skills using techniques that are common on agile projects. I particularly like his approach of trying these techniques little by little. For example, start doing unit testing, get comfortable with it and then evaluate test driven development (TDD)

Scott Bellware talks about Behavior-Driven Development (BDD):

"TDD is often specifically about the design of code units and modules such as classes.
BDD is also concerned with unit design,
but its focus addresses a much broader range of design concerns

He talks about the common misunderstanding that Test Driven Development is about testing while in fact is about design. All in all an interesting CoDe magazine issue.