Agile Engineering

Domains in this track

Target Audience

Decision Making

Decision making is the process of making choices by identifying a decision, gathering information, and assessing alternative resolutions. Using a step-by-step decision-making process can help you make more deliberate, thoughtful decisions by organizing relevant information and defining alternatives. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.

Related Practices

Affinity Diagram

Gather and combine similar items (or ideas) in an iterative manner.

The affinity process is used when a team needs to sift through large volumes of data or when new patterns of thinking are to be encouraged. The process starts by collecting a large set of data (for example ideas, opinions or issues), often through brainstorming, and laying it out on an information radiator (a big visible board). The team then organizes the data by groups based on their natural relationships. The groups can be thought of a collection of various points of views that relate to the same theme, bringing to light the root issues.

Software Development

Software development is a process of writing and maintaining the source code, but in a broader sense, it includes all that is involved between the conception of the desired software through to the final manifestation of the software, sometimes in a planned and structured process. Therefore, software development may include research, new development, prototyping, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products.

Related Resources Show Summaries

Agile Engineering

Extreme Programming Rules

4.80 (15)

Don Wells

Jun 01, 1999 • 6 min read

A complete interactive website detailing all of the rules (and values) of Extreme Programming (XP)

The turning point in current software development came in the mid 1990s. Many people were re-examining the idea that software must be built like hardware. Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber were formalizing a new process called SCRUM. Alistair Cockburn was working on Crystal Clear. Kent Beck was hired to spend a couple days each month on a project that also hired Ron Jeffries to join notable agile proponents Martin Fowler and Chet Hendrickson on the project. Kent mixed together the best practices from several emerging agile processes with things he had learned while working with Ward Cunningham. It would solve the current integration problem, allow design simplifications, and lead the team to his ultimate goal of collective ownership.

Agile Engineering

Refactoring -- Not on the backlog!

4.40 (20)

Ron Jeffries

Jul 30, 2014 • 4 min read

Should we put refactoring "stories" on the backlog?

As "Technical Debt" grows in a project, a question frequently comes up: should we put refactoring "stories" on the backlog, so they are treated as jobs-to-be-done in the next sprint? Should we have an entire session just for refactoring? In this timeless article Jon Jeffries shares his experience as to how to approach refactoring - specially as the codebase grows and starts to slow down the overall velocity of the team.

Agile Engineering

Technical Excellence

0.00 (0)

Paul Gill, William Vaughan

Jan 07, 2008 • 12 min read

A Requirement for Good Engineering

In a classic publication, Paul Gill and William Vaughan share experiences with initiatives associated with NASA's technical excellence thrust - a division designed to maintain high levels of performance in the organization. A timeless article looking at the elements of good engineering.

Sensemaking

Sensemaking is literally the act of making sense of an environment, achieved by organizing sense data until the environment “becomes sensible” or is understood well enough to enable reasonable decisions. Organized, Sensible, Understood, and Reasonable - this is the language that characterizes the information environment after good sensemaking has occurred.

Related Resources

Agile Engineering

Tools for Systems Thinkers

0.00 (0)

Leyla Acaroglu

Oct 07, 2019 • 9 min read

The 6 fundamental concepts of Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is a way broadening our view of situations by incorporating an understanding that there are overall structures, patterns and cycles beyond specific events. Leyla shares what she sees as the concepts that are critical for you to develop individual agency and systematic actions. Each of the concepts are building blocks for developing a detailed perspective of how the world works from a systems perspective and will enhance your ability to think divergently and creatively for a positive impact.

Software Architecture

Software architecture refers to the fundamental structures of a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations. The architecture of a software system is a metaphor, analogous to the architecture of a building. It functions as a blueprint for the system and the developing project, laying out the tasks necessary to be executed by the design teams.

Reasoning

Reasoning is associated with the acts of thinking and cognition, and involves using one's intellect. Like habit or intuition, is one of the ways by which thinking moves from one idea to a related idea, or to produce logically valid arguments. Reasoning is the means by which rational individuals understand sensory information from their environments, and conceptualize abstract dichotomies such as cause and effect, truth and falsehood, or ideas regarding notions of good or evil.

Logic

Logic comes from the greek word "logik?", which means "possessed of reason, intellectual, dialectical, argumentative". It is the systematic study of valid rules of inference, i.e. the relations that lead to the acceptance of one proposition (the conclusion) on the basis of a set of other propositions (premises). Logic includes the classification of arguments; the systematic exposition of the logical forms; the validity and soundness of deductive reasoning; the strength of inductive reasoning; the study of formal proofs and inference (including paradoxes and fallacies); and the study of syntax and semantics.

Problem Solving

The act of defining a problem and determining its cause; identifying, prioritizing, and selecting alternative courses of action; and implementing a solution.

Security Management

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is said to exist in any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. The term is often used to describe machines (or computers) that mimic "cognitive" functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem solving". As machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered to require "intelligence" are often removed from the definition of AI. The traditional problems (or goals) of AI research include reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception and the ability to move and manipulate objects.

Release and Deployment

The main purpose of the release and deployment management is planning, scheduling and controlling of the build, testing and deployment of releases and delivering the new functionality which is required by the businesses and at the same time, protecting the integrity of the services.