Agile Trailblazers Blog

Ever since taking hold in 2001, Agile has done nothing but grow in popularity. This osmosis of the Agile methodology is due to the positive effect is has had on helping organizations of all scope and size become more flexible, react quicker, and improve the quality of their product or service.

By applying Agile to your business, the decisions you make and actions you take will all be focused on maximizing business value delivery. The areas where Agile can have the biggest impact are:

• Software Delivery
• Prioritization of Business Needs
• Building Compliant Products
• Organizing Product Releases
• Organizing and Incentivizing Teams
• Funding New Initiatives

Here are several more specific examples of how using Agile can improve your processes.

Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driver Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD).  In this article we will cover some more advanced features of the Gherkin language that can help you write tests that are simpler and more reusable.

We will cover:

1. Using Regular Expressions for Dynamic Data
2. Scenario Outlines
3. Tables as Arguments
4. Backgrounds

In this article series we use Ruby as the implementation language (and we recommend Ruby when there is no other existing preference). However, these examples will translate easily to other languages like Java.

Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation - what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driver Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD).  In this article we will cover some more advanced features of Selenium and Cucumber and show how to environmentalize your test framework so you can run the same tests against different environments or browsers.  In this article series, we use Ruby as the implementation language (and we recommend Ruby when there is no other existing preference). However, these examples will translate easily to other languages like Java. 

If you are not familiar with Selenium, Cucumber and Gherkin take a look at our related introductory blog "The 5 Step Guide for Selenium, Cucumber, and Gherkin".

I have heard it asked many times, “Where do architects fit into Agile?” But that's the wrong question.  Instead, you should be asking, "Is our architecture Agile-Ready?"

One reason for adopting Agile is to enable “flow” to breakout – meaning your organization accelerates moving business needs from the concept phase to delivering customer value in production. Agile, grounded in Lean principals, asks your teams to look at everything that does not contribute to “flow” as waste and to eliminate it. But what if your application architecture is holding you back?