Recently, I've been involved in a project, that has its phase 1 dragged for several weeks. There are many factors at work for the delay, which I won't discuss. But one of the factors can probably be addressed technically, by automated testing.
I’ve been reading up Agile methodology, more towards Test Driven Development. Agile, or rather, extreme programming (XP), is something I first hear about from Dr Neil Roodyn who talked about extreme programming in a SgDotNet meeting in Jan 2005. He shared how XP helped his team complete an impossible job within the impossible timeframe, which another team before him has failed to deliver without XP, and different ways his team has done to indicated if the build process has passed or failed, by hooking a green and red lava lamps to the build server. The green or red lamp will light up when the build process is successful or failed.
Recently, I’ve picked up a book titled “scaling software agility” by Dean Leffingwell from the library. In the book, it quote Forrester Research [2005] in the following statistics
Agile software development processes are in use at 14% of North American and European enterprises, and another 19% of enterprises are either interested in adopting agile or already planning to do so.
In a survey of 21 companies using or considering using an agile process, Forrester notes their reasons:
- Productivity and time to market (66%)
- Reducing cost (48%)
- Improving quality (43%)
Shine Technologies, and Australian group surveyed 131 respondents from teams and companies that applied agility in 2003.
- 93% stated that productivity was better or significantly better
- 49% stated costs were reduced or significantly reduced, 46% stated that costs were unchanged
- 88% stated that quality was better or significantly better
- 83% stated that business satisfaction was better or significantly better.
While benefits are high statistically, I’m sceptical if it will work in this region, since there are lots of factors that are different, than in region that are adopting agile practices. If you are one of those who are using agile in your project, I would really love to invite you to share your experiences in our next usergroup meeting.
Project has finally been released to public, with source code for you to build the project. There isn't any documentation attached, but two custom document library and list to enable a subset of custom document library and list if you do not want to enabled all the document library in the farm.
This pet project will continue to grow, as my knowledge base will start to use wiki to capture some information (custom list not suitable to capture snippets of information because of the presentation), support version and image attachments. Neither will I have a timeline, unless someone is willing to collaborate and contribute.
Check it out @ codeplex