Collaborative Development Practices Flashcards

Which Agile value directly underpins the practice of collaborative development?

Answer: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

The Agile Manifesto prioritizes individuals and interactions, which is the philosophical foundation of all collaborative practices.

What is the primary risk of 'big bang' integration, where all code is merged at the end of a sprint?

Answer: Integration issues accumulate and become difficult to diagnose

Delayed integration allows conflicts and bugs to compound, making root-cause analysis much harder than frequent small merges.

A team adopts 'branch-by-abstraction' to enable collaborative development on a large refactor. What does this approach allow?

Answer: Refactoring to happen incrementally on the main branch without breaking functionality

Branch-by-abstraction introduces an abstraction layer so the new implementation can be built and toggled on the trunk without a long-lived branch.

During a sprint retrospective, a team member says, 'Code reviews take too long and block us.' What is the BEST collaborative response?

Answer: Agree as a team on a review turnaround SLA and smaller PR sizes

Setting a team-agreed SLA and breaking work into smaller PRs addresses both speed and review quality collaboratively.

Which of the following BEST describes 'social coding' in an Agile context?

Answer: Treating the codebase as a shared, transparent asset the whole team contributes to and learns from

Social coding means the codebase is open, readable, and improvable by all team members, fostering transparency and shared learning.

A team uses feature flags to enable collaborative development. What is the main benefit?

Answer: Incomplete features can be merged to the main branch safely without exposing them to users

Feature flags decouple deployment from release, letting teams merge early and often without exposing unfinished work to end users.

When should a pair programming session be considered 'done' for a given task?

Answer: When the task passes its acceptance criteria and automated tests, regardless of who typed the code

The goal of pairing is working, tested code that meets acceptance criteria — the role rotation is a means, not the end.