Agile Programming

The innermost grouping of practices within Ron Jeffries' Agile Circle of Life, are the programming practices. Test Driven Development Refactoring Simple Design Pair Programming We've already spent a lot of time, in previous episodes, talking about the first two of these practices; so in this episode we'll simply review them, and spend more of our time talking about how they fit into the overall Agile discipline. This is important because being an effective agile team depends, critically, on these practices. Being Agile, depends upon being simple. But being simple depends upon being clean. But being clean depends upon being free and able to do the cleaning. If you are afraid to clean, you won't clean, you can't be simple, and you will fail being agile. It's really as simple as that. So we'll talk about simplicity. We'll epand on Kent Beck's four qualities of simple design: Pass all tests Reveal Intent No Duplication Fewest Elements We'll also spend a bit of time talking about YAGNI: You Aren't Going to Need It. In the end, we'll make the point that being simple is very hard and requires a lot of work. Finally, we'll spend a bit of time talking about pair programming. We'll dispel the myths about this controversial practice, and show why any agile team must, out of sheer necessity, practice it properly.