#Agile Posts

As UX strategy and design become increasingly important, the challenge of incorporating UX specialists into Agile methodologies becomes equally important.

In this article, Toptal Freelance UX Designer Debbie Levitt explains how UX designers and creative teams can be effectively incorporated at all stages of Agile development.

While the success of your project depends on many factors, one of the most common reasons projects fail is a lack of management or downright bad project management.

In this post, Lead Engineering Editor Demir Selmanovic teaches you the basics of Agile project management using Kanban and Trello.

Small teams frequently have to compete with bigger, more structured organizations who are capable of allocating more resources to project management, and software release management in particular. This means that small teams, or even individual developers, need to properly organize and execute their release process in order to keep up.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Lucas Mancini focuses specifically on small startups, teams that don’t have, or can’t afford, DevOps support, or teams that don’t have a formal process defined for releasing new versions of their product. The author provides a suggested checklist method to manage releases, tailored to match his past experience working on different projects, together with some recommended best practices and guidelines.

The Art of War is an ancient military treatise, but despite its age, the text is still included in the syllabus at many military schools. Sun Tzu’s principles and teachings also have practical applications in politics, business, sports, and, believe it or not, software development. In fact, you might just be applying some of these principles in your daily routine, without even knowing.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jose F. Maldonado explains why many of these ancient teachings still matter, and what you can do to make them work for you and your team.

Using modern DevOps Tools like Chef, Docker, Ansible, Packer, Troposphere, Consul, Jenkins, SonarQube, AWS, etc. does not mean that you are applying DevOps principles. DevOps is a way of thinking.

One of the hardest things to do in software development is to determine how long and how much it will take to deliver a new software product. Should it be so hard? The answer is not straightforward.

When entering the remote developers’ world, the biggest obstacle that managers must overcome is to change their mindset by accepting that the developer will not be in plain sight, and where they can manage and follow the work being done.

This new paradigm requires businesses to implement a number of mechanisms to track progress and avoid a redundant workload. Such mechanisms will help both manager and developer be more productive, which is in everyone’s best interest.

Testing. It always seems to get left to the last minute, then cut because you’re out of time, budget, or whatever else. Management wonders why developers can’t just “get it right the first time”, and developers (especially on large systems) can be taken off-guard when different stakeholders describe different parts of the system.

With behavior-driven development, you can turn testing into a shared process that focuses on the behaviors of the system, why they matter, and who cares.