I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the author, but I think if you are going to 'do agile', especially in a breaky language like C++, you need to do tests. Lot

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the author, but I think if you are going to 'do agile', especially in a breaky language like C++, you need to do tests. Lots. The current shop I'm at is maintaining a huge code base, parts of which go back 20 years. Because test coverage is so low, there is a real reluctance to refactor. The first thing I did when I started here was to clean up the code, renaming miss-named variables to get it in line with the coding standard, adding autopointers here and there to head off memory leaks. By gosh, I nearly got fired. If you are going to fearlessly edit your codebase, you need to know that regressions are going to be caught. You need automated testing.