Agile 2008 - Part IV

Thursday was an interesting day. I attended seminars on Continuous Integration and some experience reports on the good and bad of offshore development.

The 100 days of CI was an experience report from a development manager at Microsoft in the Tools and Patterns division. Based on their experience, they learned that they had a 40% savings in time in fixing the broken builds over their old process.

The speaker also talked about the following best practices:

• Over spec your CI machine, nothing worse then having down time due to insufficient disk space or resources;
• Add additional daily or nightly build times. After all, what is the nightly build here is not the nightly build in India;
• Capture the data, your CI machine allows you to capture lots of metrics, so do it;
• Warnings are errors. Integrate your static analysis tools into the build. Treat their warnings as errors;
• Don't check in then go home, you may have broken the build;
• You break the build, you fix it.

The banquet was also quite nice, the keynote speaker was very engaging, and witty. Also, apparently a Republican :) The one really interesting point he made is that the benefit of TDD has been proven. If you don't adopt any other agile process, adopt TDD. I have given myself a task to research the research on TDD.