Rails - The first truly agile development platform ?

Most Agile thought leaders agree that the advent of OO and languages like Smalltalk were enablers for Agile software development methodologies. Technology has come a long way since then and we now find real "Agile" development environments in platforms like Ruby on Rails.

Let me explain ...

 

Ruby on Rails, is not only just a rapid application development environment that lets you do things fast. Ruby on Rails goes one step further by adding concepts like TDD (test driven development) directly into platform itself. For example, Rails provides it's own unit test framework or you can use the more popular behaviour driven test framework called RSpec which is totally integrated into the Rails platform. This enables development teams to apply real engineering discipline to the software development process.

Agilebuddy was written in Rails and is a poster child for Agile software development, where from the 3rd week of development was used in production to track it's own progress. Additionally Agilebuddy was developed and released in 6 months and we are able to produce and deploy new versions to production every two weeks. The only way to do this is if you have a seriously Agile codebase. And I don't know of any better way to do this than with Rails.

 

As a result, it was natural for us to build support and add features into Agilebuddy that would help the Rails community in their efforts to build rich web applications thereby enabling Rails developers to be able to manage the entire end to end software development process.

 

Next week we will be at Railsconf, and we will be demoing Agilebuddy with Git and Github integration. As far as I know we are the first to do so. This essentially allows developers to:

 

• Autolink to Agilebuddy User Stories, Tasks and Bugs from Git commit messages
• View source control history via Agilebuddy’s activity feeds
• View source control commit history contextually by User Story, Task or Bugs
• Link to GitHub commits from activity feed for direct source code inspection
• Setup Github integration with a hassle free convention over configuration approach (the Rails way) 

 

If you're at Rails, come visit us at booth number 7. We'd love to meet with you and talk to you about Agile. We are passionate about Agile and how Agile methodologies are changing the way the world builds software. In particular we are committed to helping companies achieve excellence through Agile processes and in some small way to help contribute to it's success.

 

Looking forward to meeting you.

Jack

Comments

[Brad]

I love rails. It just keeps getting better and better. One of the biggest advantages is the wealth of great plugins available - there's something for everyone out there.

Also blogging about rails, agile and web 2.0 development over at http://www.whatbraddidnext.com/

Brad