2008
Apress
Jeff Younker
ISBN: 978-1-59059-981-5
PDF
417 pages
English
If you’re embarking on a Python development project, then you should buy this book—there’s
nothing quite like it. I know this because I was looking for it last year, and I couldn’t find it.
This book introduces the tools you’ll need to get started on agile projects in Python, and
unlike any other book out there, it shows you how to tie them all together.
Sure, there are many good books on agile development. A lot of them cover the develop-
ment processes in great detail, and this is a good thing. Agile development is very much about
human interactions and the environment surrounding software development, but there is a
whole ecology of tooling to make everything work at a practical level.
Agile development eschews extensive up-front specification, and it anticipates that the
product will constantly change, but it puts in place rigorous checks to compensate for antici-
pated change. Testing is an integral part of agile development from the very start, and it is
pursued with ferocious rigor. You need software tools to facilitate testing.
Agile projects have very short release cycles, and this has implications for tooling, too.
There’s no way to have two-week release cycles if it takes you days to integrate changes, days
to perform QA, and days to package and deploy the software. This means that agile develop-
ment puts a high value on build and release automation.
While agile development techniques can be applied to any project, both testing tools and
build automation tend to be very language specific. These tools do exist in Python. They’re
widely available, and by and large they’re free, too, but the documentation tends to be . . .
um . . . spotty. And while there may be documentation on the individual tools, the documenta-
tion telling you how to tie these tools together is usually sparse to nonexistent. This book
provides that missing documentation.

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