Course on Agile development

A few weeks ago I participated in a course on Agile development, lead by Venkat Subramaniam. The course was a one day, two-part course, where the first part was an introduction to agile development with benefits of agile development, compared to other development methods. The second part was aiming to show technical practices to sustain agile development.

A few of the things I thought of as key points were frequent releases, early feedback, TDD and automated testing. As the course went on I caught myself thinking that these were practices I have thought of as reasonable earlier, without actually using them. I will not go into details regarding the techniques we saw, as I believe that others can explain them better than me.

In future projects I will definitely try to implement these practices, as I see that it could give me more flexibility in projects. I also got advice from Venkat on a book on TDD, since I don´t have much experience with it. The book is called “Growing object-oriented software, guided by tests” and is written by Steve Freemand and Nat Pryce. I haven´t finished it yet, but so far it? been a good read.

The next step will be to implement this in my next project, in which I have already started. Care to share your experience with agile development?