In our book Essential Skills for the Agile Developer: A Guide to Better Programming and Design, we pointed out several practices that can and should be done all the time. These practices:
- should be done universally
- therefore need to be of low cost (virtually none)
- yet often provide value
For deverlopers a couple of these are never using globals and consider what your tests will look like before writing code.
There are also quite a few for developers on the process side. Here are a few:
- when you’ve completed something, look to see if you can finish something you’ve started or somebody else is already working on before starting something new
- when a request is made of you ask the person “how will I know I’ve done that?” before agreeing to it
- if you’re going to need someone’s help in the future, let them know work is coming your way
- use the “rule of three” – if you’ve exchanged three emails with someone and it hasn’t resolved the issue yet, stop discussing the issue via email and set up a conversation. After three tries it is likely you won’t get it done in 4.
What other practices are there?
