Scott Lilly – Agile .Net Developer

Here are the items we came up with during our technical retrospective. Since this was our first agile project, there were a lot of … well … areas for improvement. I’ll go into more detail on how we plan on implementing changes based on the retrospective in future posts.

DO MORE

• Use generic names for namespaces (instead of company/project names)
• Evaluate newer technologies (2.0/3.0 framework, SQL Server 2005, VS 2005, etc.)
• Better use of Model-View-Presenter pattern
• Investigate LINQ
• Make sure stories/unit tests are driven from the UI to DB, not the DB to UI
• Load testing from the beginning
• External web server for testing
• Meet with Compliance team earlier in the process
• Spread deployment package knowledge (and all other knowledge) through the team
• Use typed collections
• Communicate/pushback with System Analysts/Product Specialists for features that are high-maintenance and difficult to maintain
• Develop proof of concepts
• UI test tool (Selenium or alternative)
• Let System Analysts know what tests can be automated
• Build DB from scratch (by scripts)
• Better definition of purposes of unit/integration/regression tests
• Designated time for refactoring
• Write tests first (we have 96% code coverage, but some tests were written after the code was written)
• Follow standard XP as baseline
• Experiment w/pair programming in ‘non-stuck’ situations
• Simplify environment setup
• Robust POST (Power On Self-Test)
• Protected/private/etc., instead of public (when possible)
• Keep development simple/clear/understandable

DO LESS

• Use company/app names in namespaces/classes
• Coding before stories exist
• Client-side scripting
• Frames
• Unit tests with external dependencies
• One-line methods (or very little code within the method)
• Custom exception class (use it, or lose it)