One important realization on the journey from a BDUF approach to an iterative and agile approach is that design is never done. Designs evolve. The waterfall emphasis has been to unnaturally try to control software physics by imposing requirements freezes and burdensome change control. The process of developing software is part science and part creative. You are applying science toward the invention of something. Design is capturing knowledge both about what the end user need is, and one solution to that need.
(more…)
Archive for the ‘Agile Development’ Category
Agile Design and Embedded
Thursday, November 12th, 2009Tags: Embedded, Embedded Agile, Embedded TDD, TDD, Test Driven Development
Posted in Agile Development, Agile Embedded, Embedded TDD, Evolutionary Design | No Comments »
Embedded Memory Constraints and TDD
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009Constrained Memory is the reality for many embedded developers. Running tests in the development system won’t suffer the same memory constraints found in the target. Here are a few things to help TDD in constrained memory situations.
(more…)
Posted in Agile Development, Agile Embedded, Embedded TDD, Unit Testing | 1 Comment »
Why Test Driven Development for Embedded?
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009Embedded software has all the challenges of “regular” software, like poor quality and unreliable schedules. It is just software with some additional challenges. The additional challenges do not disqualify TDD for embedded. TDD even helps with some of those uniquely embedded challenges.
(more…)
Posted in Agile Development, Agile Embedded, Embedded TDD, Test Driven Development, Unit Testing | 4 Comments »
What Should you Expect from a Unit Test Harness
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009A unit test harness’ job is to provide:
- A concise common language to express test cases
- A concise common language to express expected results
- A place to collect all the unit test cases for the project, system, or subsystem
- The facilities to run the test cases, either in full or partial batches
- A concise report of the test suite success or failure
- A detailed report of any test failures
Tags: TDD, Test Driven Development, test-driven-development-tdd
Posted in Agile Development, Agile Embedded, Embedded TDD, Test Driven Development, Unit Testing | No Comments »
Story Weight Reduction Toolkit
Saturday, August 1st, 2009Stories often start out too big. Big stories are a challenge, and it is not always obvious how to deal with them. Its important that stories be small enough to estimate, to fit easily into an iteration and to have a decent definition of done. This article explores why some stories don’t fit this mold and what you can do about it.
Posted in Agile Development, Agile Embedded, User Stories, User Story, estimation | 4 Comments »
Extra! Extra! TDD Doubles LOC and No One Cares!
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009Test Driven Development more than doubles the lines of code you have to write. With all that extra code to write, where will we ever find the time?! We have deadlines!
(more…)
Tags: Defect Prevention, TDD, Test Driven Development
Posted in Agile Development, Test Driven Development | 6 Comments »
Deep Agile Panel Questions – Documentation
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009This is the third in my Deep Agile Embedded Panel Questions series. The question is:
We had a team doing agile. To them that included not doing any documentation. We need documentation once we go into maintenance. Is doing documentation allowed in Agile?
The short answer is yes. Agile does allow documentation. Do you think agile is a totalitarian dictator? 
(more…)
Tags: Agile Documentation, Agile Embedded, Deep Agile Embedded
Posted in Agile Development, Documentation, Test Driven Development | 4 Comments »
Deep Agile Panel Questions – Change
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Prior to the Deep Agile conference, I received a number of questions about getting people to change, to try new things. Change is hard. People need to be motivated to change. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” they say. But there is always some things that are broken.
First there needs to be awareness/acceptance that there are problems to solve. Do a retrospective of the last release. Find the problems that people are passionate about. Try not have blame session. Build a logic chain from the problem to some solution you think will help. Get people to sign up to try the new approach for a month or two, not the rest of their lives. Iterations give a great opportunity for this kind of experimentation.
You have to try things, rather than just talk about them. I am not sure where this quote is from, but it is profound:
“It’s easier to act your way into thinking differently than to think your way into acting differently”
Read on for some specific questions, and my answers.
(more…)
Tags: Agile Embedded
Posted in Agile Development, Agile Embedded, Embedded TDD, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Don’t Let Embedded Tool Chain Slow You Down.
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009During my TDD session at the Embedded Systems Conference yesterday, I did a demo. Before the demo, I make the case for TDD as a way to prevent bugs (see Physics of TDD). For the live demo I usually code on my mac and run the tests there as well. The question always comes up: “You are running tests on your PC, can you run them on the target?” or maybe “Sure you can TDD on a PC, but what about the real hardware?”
(more…)
Tags: Embedded, Hardware, TDD, Test Driven Development
Posted in Agile Development, Embedded TDD, Test Driven Development, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Deep Agile Embedded Brain Storm
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009Let’s say you were an embedded systems developer, and you were planning on attending a conference like the Deep Agile Embedded.
What questions would you hope you could get answers for at the conference?
What if you already knew it all but were sending your boss, co-worker, or CEO who needed to learn more, what would you want them to hear about?
Would you want to do some hands on Test Driven Development?
Here are some of the questions we have so far:
(more…)
Tags: Agile, Deep Agile Embedded, Embedded, TDD, Test Driven Development
Posted in Agile Development, Agile Embedded, Embedded TDD, Test Driven Development | 3 Comments »