15
votes
Accepted
How do you use version control systems while you are in a long design spike phase?
TL;DR Branches are the way to go here.
Since I do not have collaborators in these projects, there is no external pressure to integrate more often or earlier.
Beware the logical inversion. Yes, ...
11
votes
Does an increment always involve a working prototype?
The wording "potentially releasable increment" may indeed appear ambiguous: some people could understand that it MUST be possible to release the product, whereas others understand that it COULD be (in ...
11
votes
Convincing "agile" product managers of the value of planning
There are a couple of key points to get out of the way:
Agile != lazy development
Spikes and Prototypes are not interchangable ideas
Nothing that you described above is prescribed by agile or scrum
...
10
votes
Accepted
Should I be unit testing during prototyping/preparing for beta?
I've worked on projects with no testing, development driven testing and actual red-green-refactor TDD, and what you describe is something I might have written before trying actual TDD.
I’ve rapidly ...
6
votes
Should a Product Owner be responsible for an initial prototype?
I would say no.
Considering that the PO should focus on defining business value.
Having the PO creating prototypes kind of influences the teams development in technical terms. I think it is important ...
5
votes
Convincing "agile" product managers of the value of planning
You can't because there is no value to them in planning.
The PMs will get credit for finishing projects on time and budget, not on how well the product works.
What you can do is trick them into ...
5
votes
Accepted
Javascript: Invest in ES6 or learn prototype fundamentals
If you're talking about a learning exercise, then I think it's very useful in the long run to fully understand how Javascript's prototype model works under the covers and the best way to do that is to ...
4
votes
Accepted
Demo versus Prototype
A demo is a presentation of results. A result is not necessarily a product or even a complete feature. It just demonstrates progress.
A prototype is a product that is expected to need more work (or ...
4
votes
Accepted
Proof of Concept and Use Case Scope
Without knowing more about your specific project a good thing to remember is that a proof of concept is just that. It's proof that a concept works. To that end, a good proof of concept should look at ...
4
votes
Does an increment always involve a working prototype?
An Increment always involves a "Done", potentially releasable, and working product. A prototype doesn't typically meet these characteristics. Instead, incremental improvement of the product is ...
3
votes
Accepted
What’s the difference between incremental and throw-away prototyping?
Such terms are alway a little bit problematic, since they mean not more or less than what the person who wrote them down had in mind with them. For a canonical answer, one had to ask them, not some ...
3
votes
Should a Product Owner be responsible for an initial prototype?
It depends on several factors:
What kind of product it is
The UI
What the requirements are for the next sprint
The people involved and their skills
This is definitely not a "yes" or "no" issue.
...
3
votes
Should a Product Owner be responsible for an initial prototype?
No the PO shouldn't be drawing designs and really you don't want them to.
For example, lets say im the CEO and I want a website to sell the company's widgets god dam it!! It's a small company so I am ...
3
votes
Should a Product Owner be responsible for an initial prototype?
The PO should do whatever is necessary to ensure that the story is clear enough and well-defined so that the team can work on it. If that means screenshots of similar products, wireframes, doodles ...
3
votes
Should a Product Owner be responsible for an initial prototype?
As the Product Owner is typically on the business side of things, he likely wouldn't be able to produce any code in any way, perhaps not even an elementary frame, but he shouldn't be expected to.
You ...
3
votes
Should I be unit testing during prototyping/preparing for beta?
Testing early is important – but not everything has to be tested, and a lot of code is not served well by TDD-style unit tests.
For a prototype, it's completely fine to temporarily ignore best ...
3
votes
What's the point of the Prototype design pattern?
This pattern can be used when the creation of the object is costly. For example, consider a class that requires configuration data from a file /database / over a network for initializing. This kind of ...
2
votes
How does rapid prototyping fit into an agile methodology?
There is a quite stablished practice in Extreme Programing called Spike. This means that it is throwaway code. There is nothing special in it. It is just a Sprint in which the expected result is the ...
2
votes
Liskov's substitution principle and prototypical languages
All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares.
You've violated the History constraint of LSP.
2
votes
Struct "prototypes" in (plain)C?
struct Building; should have worked:
struct Building;
struct Room{
char *type; //Lecture hall, laboratory, etc.
char *name;
int *capacity; //How may people it can hold
struct ...
2
votes
What’s the difference between incremental and throw-away prototyping?
The difference is in the names: "throw-away" versus "incremental."
Throw-away infers a one time prototype. This likely happens early in the product development cycle as a means to &...
2
votes
Convincing "agile" product managers of the value of planning
"How do I convince..." questions assume you are right and the product manager is wrong. From the framing of your question it doesn't look like you have made a big effort to understand the reasoning ...
2
votes
Convincing "agile" product managers of the value of planning
Take a close look:
There! A picture paints a thousand words, don't they say? Well, don't take this chart at face value, it's just an illustration, but of very specific things.
The first case (line ...
2
votes
Accepted
Mixing Creational Patterns - Prototype and Builder
You are completely right: creational patterns are not all mutually exclusive.
The builder intends to let a Director build a complex object. This may involve the creation of simpler parts that need to ...
1
vote
Convincing "agile" product managers of the value of planning
With agile, the idea is to plan by doing, and clean as you go. When I have a week to plan a feature for a messy code base, the process goes something like this:
Spend a morning brainstorming rough ...
1
vote
Accepted
How many valid users to test the software that has been developed?
In Usability testing there is a sort of rule, based on an article by Jacob Nielsen, that tells you that 5 users is usually enough to find most issues on a given system. Beyond 5, the new finds are ...
1
vote
Struct "prototypes" in (plain)C?
Jerry's answer will fix your immediate problem, but I think you should reconsider your data model. Circular relationships are almost always bad juju, and should be avoided whenever possible.
I think ...
1
vote
Should you exercise TDD on prototype applications?
Personally I do TDD whenever I'm on contract or write code for someone. When I build a prototype for myself and I'm uncertain about its future then I try to move forward as fast as possible and ...
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
Related Tags
prototyping × 73javascript × 23
object-oriented × 7
design × 6
programming-languages × 6
development-process × 6
design-patterns × 4
testing × 4
agile × 4
inheritance × 4
python × 3
jquery × 3
unit-testing × 2
c × 2
html × 2
requirements × 2
constructors × 2
user-experience × 2
product-owner × 2
java × 1
architecture × 1
c++ × 1
php × 1
database × 1
git × 1