I have just completed reading Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin and Micah Martin. I learned a lot while reading this book, particularly about patterns. This book contains a lot of information with its’ 38 chapters and 700 pages, but it is written in a easy to read language and have plenty of figures and code examples. I think that everyone involved in software development will benefit from reading this book, particularly developers and solution architects.

Section 1 in this book focuses on agile development covering practices, Extreme programming, planning, testing, refactoring and a case study.

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This is a follow up on a post I wrote earlier about how I like to use Scrum and ScrumWorks for my projects. After writing that post I have had some good discussions on how to manage bug fixing in a Scrum sprint. A good friend and former colleague of mine wrote a good post on how they achieve this in mBricks using JIRA and GreenHopper.

The last months I have been handling bug fixes and rapidly incoming change orders in ScrumWorks and this have been (in my opinion) a great success.

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I have earlier written a post about writing use cases for agile (Scrum) projects, this is a follow up about writing user stories. Do you find it strange that I first wrote about use cases and later are writing about user stories? Well… to be honest with you we started with writing use cases and then later found that this was insufficient and we needed to break the use cases down to short user stories (post-it format).

By doing so you are able to focus on exactly what the user need/want without going into details on how this should be done. We came up with the following template for user stories (I’m saying we because I did this together with a colleague of mine. You can read his blog at www.agilemobility.net).

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I have believed in using Scrum as a software development methodology since I first were introduced to Scrum back in 2005/2006. After a while I took the ScrumMaster certification (CSM) and started using Scrum as the preferred development methodology. During this time Scrum was getting very popular i Norway. It had become a buzz word and projects were either using Scrum or talking about using Scrum.

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Today I started writing use cases for a software development project that are using Scrum. I have written plenty use cases for projects earlier so I thought that this would be a nice task to do on a Friday. I grabbed a good cup of coffee, sat down, listened to Me first and the gimme gimmes on my headset and started writing.

Suddenly I started thinking; this can not be in the spirit of agile development. I had started writing very detailed use cases with a lot of text and description. I turned to my colleague sitting beside me, he’s found of agile development and we often discuss the subject, and asked him what he thought about the use case I had started writing. Then the discussion on how to write use cases for agile projects started…

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After participating in a project with focus on architecture, patterns and clean code I got a revelation: Clean code principles should be used in every software development project. I also started feeling that using clean code principles is not only a good tool but it’s a matter of taking pride in what you do. Who wants to deliver code that is unstructured and hard to read and understand?

During this project I also read a very good book about clean code: Clean Code – A Handbook of Agile Software Craftmanship, written by Robert C. Martin

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