Agile Source Code

Following some very simple source code best practices can help your development teams be better prepared to make the transition to Agile.

This should be obvious, but there are development teams who do not store their source code in a source control tool.

Developer Work Environments

Each developer should work in a private workspace. This might be an area on their laptop that their IDE points to that contains the code from the branch they are working against.

That way, any changes they make are isolated in this area until they are fully tested and ready to integrate with their team.

Source Code Best Practices

• Do not share workspaces
• Check in your code often
• Stay current with the code line

Branching

To support parallel development and to properly support of previous releases, development teams should use a logical branching strategy.

One that isolates the separate releases from each other yet allows for easy merging of code between the branches.

• Branch only when required
• Branch to isolate tasks

Builds

Automate nightly builds. Include system deployment and automated testing to ensure the application's stability.

Implementing Continuous Integration builds allows for instant sanity checks for developers. Like the full system builds, include a deployment of the application. Then run a system smoke test to ensure the system is stable after every check in.

Agile Build Best Practices

• Email the results of the build to responsible parties
• Include build logs, a list of what version of the source code are in this build, and a list of the newly versioned build artifacts.

Agile Links

Agile Software

Agile SCM

Agile Continuous Integration

Agile Source Code