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15 votes
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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, ...
Flater's user avatar
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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 ...
Christophe's user avatar
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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 ...
Daniel's user avatar
  • 2,041
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 ...
l0b0's user avatar
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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 ...
HankTheTank's user avatar
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 ...
Ewan's user avatar
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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 ...
jfriend00's user avatar
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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 ...
Martin Maat's user avatar
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4 votes
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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 ...
coteyr's user avatar
  • 2,583
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 ...
Thomas Owens's user avatar
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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 ...
Doc Brown's user avatar
  • 214k
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. ...
Doc Brown's user avatar
  • 214k
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 ...
Ewan's user avatar
  • 79.9k
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 ...
mmathis's user avatar
  • 5,508
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 ...
Aganju's user avatar
  • 1,473
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 ...
amon's user avatar
  • 135k
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 ...
user267234's user avatar
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 ...
Borjab's user avatar
  • 1,339
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.
David Cowden's user avatar
  • 2,903
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 ...
Jerry Coffin's user avatar
  • 44.7k
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 &...
Greg Burghardt's user avatar
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 ...
JacquesB's user avatar
  • 61k
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 ...
Vector Zita's user avatar
  • 2,482
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 ...
Christophe's user avatar
  • 80.6k
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 ...
Karl Bielefeldt's user avatar
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 ...
Juan Carlos Eduardo Romaina Ac's user avatar
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 ...
John Bode's user avatar
  • 10.9k
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 ...
Martin Nowosad's user avatar

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