Agile 101: Programming

Tom Mochal, PgMP, PMP, TSPM is the president of TenStep, Inc., a methodology development, consulting and training company. Tom won the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Project Management Institute for his work spreading knowledge of project management around the world. He is a speaker, lecturer, instructor and consultant to companies and organizations around the world.

  Agile   ProjectsAtWork  

Here are some general programming techniques and practices to keep in mind when constructing your Agile application, all the more important because of an Agile project’s heavy reliance on solid code to make up for light, if any, external documentation.

This is not a “how-to” guide to programming. The nuances and techniques of programming can vary widely from language to language. The programming advice for the Cobol II language would not all be appropriate for the Java, C++ and Visual Basic languages. However, there are some general techniques and practices to keep in mind when you are constructing your Agile application. In fact, these techniques are valid with most programming models. However, they are more important in Agile because of its heavier reliance on solid code to make up for light (if any) external code documentation. 

Modularize your components. In the distant past, it was not uncommon to see programs that contained thousands of lines of code to complete one entire transaction or to even represent an entire application. This has proven to be a poor programming technique. Generally, it is better to isolate each major logical component into its own physical component as well. This provides much more flexibility in terms of modifications and extensibility. Changes can be isolated to the particular components that need to be changed, …

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