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Latest Additions to the Agile Zone

This page contains all the latest updates to the Agile Zone.

Papers

* An Initial Investigation Of Test Driven Development In Industry 
(Boby George and Laurie Williams)

Some research on the use of Test Driven Development (TDD). They ran a set of structured experiments with 24 professional pair programmers.

One group developed code using TDD while the other a waterfall-like approach. Both groups developed a small Java program. We found that the TDD developers produced higher quality code, which passed 18% more functional black box test cases. However, TDD developer pairs took 16% more time for development. A moderate correlation between time spent and the resulting quality was established upon analysis.

* Why Is Agile Development So Scary? 
(Preston Smith)

This is a pragmatic overview of why Agile works. I particularly liked the reference to Donald Reinertsen?s research that showed:

* Out of hundreds of projects, there is no case in which requirements remained stable throughout design.

* Of more than 200 product developers, fewer than 5% had complete requirements before beginning design.

* On average, design commenced with only 58% of requirements specified.

If requirements are going to change, wouldn't we be better off acknowledging this and building our processes to accommodate it.