« What’s really agile?

Today we ended a scrum sprint, two weeks long.

In two weeks a team of five developers managed to setup a project using state of art tecnologies such as DRW, ActiveMQ, ServiceMix, Hibernate, Spring, Atomikos XA Transactions.

Not only we have a use case up and running and we are able to show case it to the customer.

Now, few choices in my opinion made this “more agile”.

• The usage of Maven, we have probably 50 dependencies, I can’t imagine how to handle this with ant.
• The usage of Hudson as CI tool, simple UI, no need to read the manual
• The usage of Spring, in a couple of hours we had all we need (DAOs, JMS senders and receivers especially)
• The usage of Hibernate3 with annotations, can’t be faster to write down your domain
• The usage of Jetty to have a fast feedback locally
• Well, ovious maybe but worth mention, we wrote tests first, we used Junit4.5
• Flexible pair programming, we paired only when in trouble or when we felt the solution was mature enough to be showcased and shared in the team
• Focused work, one developer on the Web UI, one on the deployment, one on the ServiceMix/ActiveMQ, one on the Transactions + Design of the system

I call this agile, hard work and good fun.