The most important Agile tool

Having just completed a review of our latest release, a lot of the team complained about the lack of some of the tools and processes that we've become used to in recent times. These shortfalls were mainly due to the fact that we're integrating with a new team but it led me to think about which single tool I'd hate to be without.

The answer is Continuous Integration, we use CruiseControl by the way.

We get a lot of spin-offs for doing this, especially as we're a distributed team, the main one being an implicit communication tool, everyone is using it, so we can all see who's doing what. Other benefits are that we also using several build metrics, so I believe the quality level is kept high, which gives a much warmer feeling, especially when the pressure is on.

Which Agile tool or process would you hate to be without?

Python homework

As part of a 'Python study group' at work, we were given the following challenge:


Exercise 1:

Write a program that processes a list of numbers from 1 to 100. For each number, if the number is a multiple of 3, print “FIZZ”; if the number is a multiple of 5, print “BANG”; otherwise, print the number.

You are *NOT* allowed to use any *IF/ELSE* statements in your code. You can use the list-accessing ternary operator hack, but whilst I’ll accept your homework if you do, you’ll miss out on the prize (alcoholic), which goes to the most concise code (not including whitespace).

Have fun!


Here's my final solution:

for i in range(1, 101):
  f = (i % 3 == 0) and "FIZZ" or ""
  b = (i % 5 == 0) and f + "BANG" or f + ""
  n = (len(b) > 0) and b or i
  print n