Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Practices of an Agile Developer

On the flights down to FL, I was able to read a book that my team will be reviewing in the upcoming months, Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt.



The authors chose a style that I think captures the bipolar disorder shared by most cognizant software developers. It presents topics both from the perspective of the devil who might encourage us to "just duplicate this code, don't bother keeping the system DRY" and the angel who would give us a gentle reminder that "duplication is just a shortcut, and you will have to maintain both sets of code later on". It's amazing how many times you find yourself listening to that devil on a daily basis.

The book is very easy to read even if you don't have a ton of time to devote to it. Chapters are usually 30 pages or under and each one is broken into a number of atomic topics. 'Fixed Prices are Broken Promises' and 'Architects Must Write Code' were two which immediately struck a chord with me.

Additionally, the book has a ton of good quotes that should be tattooed on the back of our hands or at least put on a whiteboard in plain view. My favorites are "Blame doesn't fix bugs", "Negativity kills innovation", and "Blindly picking a framework is like having kids to save taxes".

All in all, a very good read and immediately applicable to developers both agile and not.

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