Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams.
Agile methods break tasks into small increments with minimal planning, and do not directly involve long-term planning.Iterations are short time frames that typically last from one to four weeks. Each iteration involves a team working through a full software development cycle including planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing, and acceptance testing when a working product is demonstrated to stakeholders. This helps minimize overall risk, and lets the project adapt to changes quickly.
Agile methods emphasize face-to-face communication over written documents when the team is all in the same location. When a team works in different locations, they maintain daily contact through videoconferencing, voice, e-mail, etc.
The waterfall model is the most structured of the methods, stepping through requirements-capture, analysis, design, coding, and testing in a strict, pre-planned sequence. Progress is generally measured in terms of deliverable artifacts: requirement specifications, design documents, test plans, code reviews and the like.
A common criticism of the waterfall model is its inflexible division of a project into separate stages, where commitments are made early on, making it difficult to react to changes in requirements as the project executes. Iterations are expensive. This means that the waterfall model is likely to be unsuitable if requirements are not well understood or are likely to change in the course of the project.
Agile methods, in contrast, produce completely developed and tested features (but a very small subset of the whole) every few weeks. The emphasis is on obtaining the smallest workable piece of functionality to deliver business value early, and continually improving it and adding further functionality throughout the life of the project. If a project being delivered under the waterfall method is cancelled at any point up to the end, there is nothing to show for it beyond a huge resources bill. With the agile method, being cancelled at any point will still leave the customer with some worthwhile code that has likely already been put into live operation.
Test Driven Development : When sitting down to create an application, many developers start by writing the code. Test Driven Development emphasizes the opposite, stressing the need to prepare test scenarios or test cases before writing the code itself. This seemingly backwards approach has some benefits. First of all, it requires that the programmer be very clear about what tests the program should pass and what test it should fail, bringing such concerns to the forefront of the software design process. Furthermore, by meticulously detailing what tests a system should pass and fail we can use tools to automate most of our tests. An automated job is one that's always very, very easy to do. These automated tests are meant to be run every time there's a code change and are referred to as unit tests.
NUnit is a free, open-source tool for .NET that is developed as a framework which can help automate unit testing. (The same unit test framework was already available for Java and was named jUnit.) NUnit can be downloaded from NUnit site or the SourceForge NUnit page.
TortoiseSVN : In software development, Subversion (SVN) is a version-control system initiated in 1999 by CollabNet Inc. Developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly-compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS).
A Subversion client, implemented as a windows shell extension.
TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.
Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like.
TortoiseSVN is free to use. You don't need to get a loan or pay a full years salary to use it.
Windows services are applications that run outside of any particular user context in Windows NT, Windows 2000, or Windows XP.
