Recently I attended the Agile Edge conference in London, where I presented a talk entitled “Compare and Contrast the Implementation of Agile methods in the Enterprise and ISVs”, sound thrilling or what? Actually, it is an interesting talk (well my audience thought so anyway) but it begs the question “What does DevExpress have to do with agile development”?
Well, as it happens, there are two principles of the Agile Manifesto, where DevExpress can support the agile team. The first of those is
“Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.”
DevExpress helps the agile team achieve this principle with our CodeRush product. The new code analysis feature in the 9.X version help developers maintain “technical excellence and good design”. With this feature of CodeRush enabled the tool will mark (in the right hand gutter) the line in the source code where it thinks the developer has deviated from best practice. When the developer then highlights the mark, CodeRush will provide a call out detailing errors in the developer’s code (as shown in the image to the left). This will allow the developer to systematically work his way down the list of results from the analysis until all the results have been fixed, or the developer is satisfied that they can safely be ignored.
Of course, this feature requires the use of background compilation and as such may slow down your environment (although I have to say it doesn’t on my Thinkpad Z61p with 3Gb of RAM). If you find that this is the case, then the feature can be turned on and off, as required, by clicking the appropriate button in the toolbar.
The other principle where DevExpress can help the agile team is
“Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.”
It’s much easier to see how DevExpress can help the agile team with this principle. Our large array of components for Windows, web, WPF and Silverlight cuts down, drastically, the amount of work that a team of developers has to do. If your team is handed the task of developing a new accountancy suite for your enterprise, you do not want to be spending three months developing your own charting solution, for example. No, you want to buy in a really solid third party solution - in other words, you want to “maximize the amount of work not done”.
So, as you can see, although it may not appear at first glance that a company like DevExpress has a lot to offer the agile team, if you scratch beneath the surface you will see that we have tools and components that will help you achieve the principles of the Agile Manifesto.