Adopt Related Practices

Adopt Related Practices

In most cases you would not adopt one practice at a time, but rather a few or more practices at once. There is no obvious grouping of practices. In some cases three or four practices seem to address a problem you are facing , and you choose to adopt all of them. In other cases you may decide that you want to adopt all or most of the practices related to a certain principle. You may want to consider adopting a few other common combinations or themes of practices together.

Practices Supporting Iterative Development<title/>

Most practices in this book support iterative development, directly or indirectly. The following list includes some of the more critical practices:

• Practice 1: Manage Risk explains how to identify and prioritize key risks. Key risks are used to determine what to focus on in the next iteration.

• Practic 2: Execute Your Project in Iterations describes how to plan iterative development and think about dividing up your project into a series of iterations.

• Practice 3: Embrace and Manage Change describes what changes to encourage and discourage at what time within a project. Discouraging certain types of changes late in the project is essential to manage risk effectively.

• Practice 4: Measure Progress Objectively explains how to assess progress better through iterative development.

• Practice 5: Test Your Own Code details how developers can approach testing their own code holistically and includes techniques that will potentially participate in a broader test automation strategy.

• Practice 6: Leverage Test Automation Appropriately describes how automating appropriate amounts of the test effort can also realize improved product quality and shorter product development schedules.

• Practice 7: Everyone Owns the Product! addresses how all team members need to orient their mindset to enable effective iterative development.

• Practice 10: Prioritize Requirements for Implementation shows how to determine which requirements to address first to deliver customer value and to mitigate key risks.

• Practice 14: Manage Versions discusses how to manage the complexity of evolving hundreds of artifacts as you iterate.

If you want to move toward iterative development, these practices should be on your shortlist to adopt.

Practices Improving Your Ability to Manage Requirements

Problems with requirements management are often quoted as a primary source for project failures. As an example, the 1995 Chaos Report by the Standish Group listed requirements management issues as five of the top ten reasons for project failure. A number of practices in this book will help you improve the management of requirements:

• Practice 2: Execute Your Project in Iterations describes how to plan iterative development and think about dividing up your project into a series of iterations, so that you can get feedback on the requirements.

• Practice 7: Everyone Owns the Product! addresses how all team members need to orient their mindset to enable effective iterative development.

• Practice 8: Understand the Domain describes how to document key aspects of the problem domain to minimize communication issues and to increase every team member's understanding of the problem domain.

• Practice 9: Describe Requirements from the User Perspective outlines how to document requirements in the form of use cases, scenarios, and user stories and how to support your requirements with storyboards and user-interface prototypes .

• Practice 10: Prioritize Requirements for Implementation shows how to determine which requirements to address first to deliver customer value and to mitigate key risks.