Nearly every embedded software team I encounter is interested in becoming more agile. Adopting Agile practices can dramatically improve how agile a team is. Businesses and developers all want to be able to deliver faster. We don’t want the headache of late and buggy code, yet we often just accept that is what life is in the software world; However, it doesn’t have to be that way. In this post, we will explore five tips for becoming more Agile.
Tip #1 – Ditch Code Review, Adopt Pair Programming
There is a big push within the software industry to do more code reviews. Studies have shown that code reviews are the most effective way to identify and remove bugs. However, there are a lot of problems that are encountered with code reviews! First, developers don’t want to do them! They are viewed as time-consuming, boring, and generally get in the way of getting real work done. I’ve encountered teams where they know they should do more code reviews, but the idea of reviewing 400 lines of code per hour (the industry recommended pace), is a snail’s pace when there are 10’s or 100’s of thousands of lines of code that need to be reviewed.
A simple tip to make software development more agile is to ditch most code reviews and adopt pair programming instead. When two developers are working together to write the code, they will be performing a code review while the code is being written. The result is that mistakes and issues are often caught immediately, removing the need for boring team code reviews. Larger code reviews can be saved for mission-critical code, saving the software teams many headaches, and helping to make them more productive.
Tip #2 – Automate Testing
If you took a moment to examine the many different Agile practices that have been defined over the years, you’ll notice that a critical one is testing. Software developers are notoriously bad at testing, and therefore many of the disciplines focus on testing. For example, if you look at Ron Jeffries's Circle of Life diagram, shown below, you’ll find that testing is found in every layer (TDD, CI, Customer Tests). To become more Agile, developers need to adopt better testing practices and make sure that they are automated.
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