Agile Misconception #2: We Don’t Need Documentation

Documentation means a lot of different things to different people. I’ve also found it’s one of the top five topics to cause a developer to cringe. If you’ve used a waterfall software development process, you’re all too familiar with documentation. From requirements to systems architecture to design, you’re creating documentation at every step of the […]

Agile Misconception #1: Deadlines Don’t Exist

I recently worked with a client who was extremely frustrated with deadlines that seemed to come from nowhere, made no sense to him, and didn’t fit with his idea of Scrum as a methodology. He believed that according to Agile/Scrum, “the business” was not allowed to give deadlines to development teams. Scrum, he believed, allowed […]

A “Grand Unified Theory” of Agile

Okay, that’s a bit grandiose, I admit. But I often see tweets or posts about how people don’t “get” capital-A Agile. Tweets like this and this point out common faults. Everything they say is technically correct but not especially useful. Pointing out all of the not-get-its in the wild won’t make people “get it” better, […]

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 […]

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Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

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