We are slowly becoming advocates of agile experimentation. It is a practice co-developed at CODEFUSION that aims mostly into small experiments in a business driven software engineering environment like ours. An environment where the developer is a scarce resource and the impact of the experimentation on the return-of-investment driven software project needs to be minimal. In a paper recently published at Springer (co-authored by our CEO) the Agile Experimentation Manifesto is introduced:
- Use small-n and single case experiments rather than large scale experiments to cut costs and enable experimentation.
- Care about the power of your experiments to reduce waste.
- Search for the best experiment design that fits your settings.
- Use friction free tools for data gathering to not interfere with the real-world development environment.
- Use just-in-time quantitative data rather than late, post project qualitative surveys to enable early informed decisions (on a basis of quantitative data instead of late anecdotal information).
The Manifesto will be presented in September at the XVIII KKIO Software Engineering Conference in Worcław, Poland.
