Agile Just Enough Architecture

Many people consider that software architecture is a burden for agile software development and that a “good” design will naturally emerge as code is produced during each Scrum sprint. This however rarely the case and as in many other activities, you have to find the right balance between doing enough but not too much software architecture. In the article, “A Risk-Driven Model for Agile Software Architecture“,  George Fairbanks, the author of the book “Just Enough Software Architecture – A Risk-Driven Approach“, explains how to achieve this balance.

The main rule is that the effort you spend on designing your software architecture should be commensurate with the risks faced by your software development project. The article examines how risk reduction is central to all engineering disciplines. It explains how to choose techniques to reduce risks and show how you can balance planned design with evolutionary design during agile software development projects.

Software Development Certifications

Certifications have become an important part of the life of software development professionals. If there is some aims by hiring organizations to try to assess the capacity of their future employees, certification is also a lucrative market for training companies and professional organizations that sell, sorry provide the certifications. The situation is very competitive in the project management market where besides the traditional PMP certification provided by the Project Management Institute, there has been the increased adoption of agile project management certification, mainly the ScrumMaster official titles provided by either the Scrum Alliance or Scrum.org. This is so true that the PMI has now developed its own Agile Project Management certification. Certifications are also present in another number of software development areas. According to the Software Testing Magazine, the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) is the clear leader in the field of software testing certifications, with only few competitors that act more locally. In the area of software requirements management and business analysis certification, the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) is the main professional and certification organization. There are however alternative certification scheme provided by organizations like the International Requirements Engineering Board, the British Computer Society (BCS) or the Object Management Group (OMG) which specialize in UML-based analysis certifications.

Building the Right Scope

Use cases, user stories, or backlog items already define broadly the scope of a project. Many teams consider requirements as something provided by the business users, product owners or customers. Asking business users to provide the scope is effectively relying on someone who has no experience designing software solutions to give us a high level solution design. This article explains how project teams can work together with business users to come up with the right scope. To reach this goal, you need to start with business goals, and not with user stories, and derive the scope from that.

Agile Requirements

The clarity of requirements is an issue for many  software development projects. Based on a course on Agile Requirements, this article at summarizes the levels of Agile (and frankly non Agile) requirements and how you can use a four step process for gathering them.

Java and Software Quality in the Summer 2011 issue of Methods & Tools

Methods & Tools – the free e-magazine for software developers, testers and project managers – has just published its Summer 2011 issue with the following articles:
* Continuous Delivery Using Build Pipelines With Jenkins and Ant
* Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Software Measurement
* The Art of Mocking
* Restructure101 for Java  – Refactor Your Software Architecture
* Maven – Java Build Management
* Automated WebTesting with Selenium RC
* Liquibase – Open Source Dababase Version Control

55 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?summer11