Using open source software is all the rage these days, and for good reason. Often teams don’t have the budget to purchase commercial tools, and without an open source solution, their productivity suffers. But open source is not a panacea. There are some challenges that can hit you hard if you aren’t careful.

The Boy Scouts have a rule: “Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” You should apply the same principle to your code. Regular refactoring prevents code rot by keeping the code base clean and easy to maintain. Refactoring activities can be added to the product backlog as user stories to make it a discipline.

The test pyramid is a valuable visual in agile. In particular, it argues that unit tests should make up the majority of tests, and while agile teams recite this principle, it is often not clear why it is so important. Here are five reasons unit tests should make up the majority of tests written for an application.