Dec

Agile Demos Smells

Eli Lopian Category

There are many things that I look at when I see a demo, one of thing that fascinates me are demo smells. These are automatic actions that developers do when the demo doesn’t quite go well that underlay conceptual problems.

For example when seeing a demo at the end of an iteration, does the developer have some script that he keeps running from time to time, does the developer delete files when something wrong happens, is the process monitor running. Looking at these actions gives great insight into the potential architectural bugs.

If there is a batch file, there might be some kind of environment problem, if files are being deleted there might be some integrity problem, if the process monitor is up there might be a process synchronization problem.

It is normally cheaper in the long run to solve the root problems and save time when running the application then to keep performing these automatic actions.

Ask about these actions, you will get surprising answers! Then see what can be done to remove these actions.