How We Used a Week of Spikes to Map Out a Feature

For those uninitiated to agile software development, “a spike solution is a very simple program to explore potential solutions” to a particularly challenging problem. This term and definition comes from XP Explained by Kent Beck, and it is still as relevant today as it ever was.

The Atomic Agile Process

The best process is owned by its team, but everyone has to start somewhere. That’s why I drafted this, a template for Atomic Object’s Agile process. It’s designed to be a starting point for our maker teams as they come together to tackle a new project.

Kicking off an Experiment in Agile Family Management

I became aware of the idea of taking the “Agile” approach to software development outside of a technical environment and into the family when I heard a talk Bruce Feiler gave at TEDSalon in New York City in 2013. Feiler identified some of the pain I experience as a parent. I feel like I am constantly on […]

Successful Sprint Retrospectives: Tips and Tools

A sprint retrospective is a brief collaborative exercise that teams can do at the end of each sprint—typically as part of the sprint review meeting. Its purpose is to reflect on what happened during the sprint with the goal of improving the team, but there are other benefits, like building team chemistry, sharing knowledge, promoting a sense of […]

Agile + Scrum = More Effective Iteration Meetings

Do your iteration meetings drag on forever, include thrashing and tangential conversations, or seem generally unproductive? Being structured about agile iteration meetings allows the Development Team to stay on track and get the most value from stakeholders’ time.

Travis CI Now Monitoring Ceedling and Friends CMock/Unity!

We have updated Ceedling and release a new Rubygem to bundle the latest TDD counterparts, CMock and Unity, to utilize Travis CI to monitor the health of our tools at the ThrowTheSwitch GitHub organization! Atomic Object has blazed the trail of bringing effective test-driven development (TDD) and continuous integration (CI) to C development for nearly a decade. When we embarked on […]

Balanced Team is Coming to Grand Rapids in 2015

Update February 2015: Tickets for the event are now on sale! Early bird tickets are available through mid-February; standard tickets will be available after that. Please visit the Balanced Team 2015 Grand Rapids website for more information. We’re excited you’ll be joining us. See you soon! Many teams and organizations struggle with the question, “How […]

Considering a New Methodology? First, Understand the Question

In Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, an advanced civilization builds a supercomputer to calculate “the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.” After millions of years of calculation, the computer finally gives its answer: forty-two. Despite being an advanced civilization, it succumbed to the pitfall of getting an answer without first […]

7 Ways to Keep Your Big Project Agile

Most of our projects here at Atomic Object take just 2-6 developers. But sometimes we work closely with other teams that are much larger. On my current project, we’re part of our client’s much larger team, about 20 people. The team started out small, and as we’ve grown in size, we’ve had to refactor our […]

3 Reasons I Choose Agile Design over Waterfall

What does it mean to use an agile or waterfall approach to software development? What makes it different for the client? Where does it make the most impact for your project? Leading Up to Atomic Object The keyword here is agile, and what it means to me (a designer) working in an environment founded on […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

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