Development Best Practices

There are many simple techniques that teams can implement to improve their efficiency and accuracy. Most of these have one thing in common: they are designed to spread knowlege and increase communication.

Regardless of what practicies you decide to adopt, for a team to maximize it's effectiveness it's essential to discover ways to maximize the efficiency and quality of it's communications.

Three main area's were communication can be improved:

• within the team
• with parties external to the team
• between the developers and the system they are developing

The last point may appear to be a little flipant but we're quite serious about this. As the primary work product of the team and system reflects essential knowledge that the team is accumulating. Ignore it at your peril.

The term best practices is one of those buzz-words that's overused so much it has has become all but meaningless. Who is it that gets the decide what's a best practice and what's not?

Ultimately you must decide what practices you wish to adopt yourself. As a company we've tried different practices and have a good feel for works and what doesn't. Here's some we really like:

• continuous integration
• commandline build
• automated testing
• daily team meetings
• test driven design
• collective code ownership
• agressive refactoring