LOGIN | REGISTER NOW | SUBSCRIBE
 
 
News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>


   

 
 
Download Current Issue
ISSUE 2/1/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?


 
blogs tab
Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Available Today
A Visual Studio 2010 release candidate is available on MSDN.
02/09/2010 09:45 AM EST

Is Microsoft eyeing Office subscription pricing?
Microsoft may be preparing to offer a new Office pricing option called "union," which charges the same for cloud as on-premises.
02/01/2010 09:38 AM EST

Facebook rewrites PHP runtime
Facebook is about to open source its own PHP runtime, written from scratch for speed.
01/30/2010 08:53 PM EST

 

Events calendar tab
Macworld 2010
2/9/2010 to 2/13/2010
San Francisco
IDG World Expo

SPTechCon 2010
2/10/2010 to 2/12/2010
San Francisco
BZ Media

PyCon 2010 (Python Conf.)
2/17/2010 to 2/25/2010
Atlanta
Python Software Foundation

Southern Calif. Linux Expo
2/19/2010 to 2/20/2010
Los Angeles
SCALE

IBM Pulse
2/21/2010 to 2/24/2010
Las Vegas
IBM


 
print Printable version 
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Facebook brings HipHop to PHP
HipHop compiles PHP to speed up the Web layer at world's most popular social networking si...

Adobe moves LiveCycle application platform to the cloud
Release gives developers just what they need to create targeted business process-oriented ...

Oracle acquires AmberPoint
Today's merger will probably affect most of AmberPoint's existing partnerships with other ...

Digg!  Digg
Reddit  Reddit
Slashdot  Slashdot
Share on facebook  Facebook
Share on Twitter  Twitter

Agile development: Dogma vs. degree


By David Rubinstein
June 8, 2009 — 
So, just how agile is your agile process?

While those who preach the dogma of the Agile Manifesto have loosened their belief that agile is an all-or-nothing affair, debate continues over what constitutes an agile development shop.

On one side of the argument are those who believe that adopting any of the steps is a move toward agility; that the important thing is not adherence to the steps but instead an improvement in the organization’s software development. Others acknowledge that any improvement is beneficial, but the technique employed can’t be called agile if the practices of XP, or Scrum, or the other agile methodologies are not followed to the letter.

“Any really meaty trend has great dogmatism to get started. Otherwise, who’s going to follow you?” said VersionOne CEO Robert Holler. “You throw the gauntlet down and get followers. There’s nothing like great controversy to make things happen. It had to start that way.”

That said, Holler noted that extremism about agile might not be every organization’s reality. “People are realistic enough to know they can localize it to meet their internal business requirements. They might water things down, but are they improving? It’s come to a reasonable state now. When applying agile in mainstream software organizations, you can’t change overnight. But are things improving?”

Consultant Paul Hodgetts of Agile Logic said he’s seeing a lot of agile development happening in enterprise shops at varying degrees of implementation. “Agile seems to be on the radar for most CEOs and CIOs, like offshoring was a couple of years ago. They’re at least looking into it to stay current.

“The ones that are implementing deeper and broader and getting real big payoffs are limited,” he continued. "I’d say one out of 10 big organizations are really taking it deep enough across the organization” to see the big payoff, he said. “One-third to one-half stall out pretty quickly. They hit plateaus and they stop. There are some organizational changes they’d have to make that they either can’t or are unwilling to get past.”

There are ways to measure an organization’s level of agile implementation. IBM describes it with its own Agile Process Maturity Model, which defines three levels of process maturity. Rally describes something it informally calls the “Flow, Pull, Innovate” method.

In a lengthy blog posting, Scott Ambler, IBM's practice leader for agile development, defines level 1 of the APMM as having adopted Scrum, XP, agile modeling or agile data modeling, and testing or refactoring. Level 2 calls for more discipline in the development life cycle, including the use of hybrid processes, such as Scrum and XP. Adoption of the Rational Unified Process, the Open Unified Process, Harmony for embedded systems, or Dynamic System Development Method, which was based on Rapid Application Development, helps organizations get to this level.

The top level calls for agility at scale, taking into consideration such things as physical distribution of the team, regulatory compliance, system complexity and enterprise disciplines. The APMM, Ambler writes, is “orthogonal to the [SEI’s] Capability Maturity Model Integration [and] strives to define a framework which can be used to put the myriad agile processes into context.”

But Rally Software founder Ryan Martens believes existing measurements of development process maturity are just fine. “The CMM model applies for agile as well as waterfall projects. We don’t need another model. To me, that’s a vendor cookbook.”
Martens said to achieve process maturity, an organization needs to look within and not have a vendor tell you where you are at. “Our model is to look for teams to get a flow, a repeatable capability of delivering what they’re committed to,” Martens explained. “You get the drumbeat. You understand how to deliver in a two-week time box.”

This is also where developers build confidence at the senior management level to dive into more agile development. Then you have to move the team from the flow to pulling work as required, such as pulling out a build to test for security or performance, to eliminate the backlog of requests. “You’ve figured out the organizational problems and roadblocks,” Martens said.

Finally, to scale to these practices, multiple teams or disparate organizations, a top-down push is needed. “They [top executives] have to provide enough slack time to innovate,” Martens said. “You have to be able to take advantage of the things that are falling onto your plate.”

All of which makes open-source ALM company Atlassian very nervous. “We feel the term ‘agile’ is a loaded term,” said director of product marketing Daniel Freeman. “We don’t want to be typecast as a process Nazi.”

Atlassian recently purchased the GreenHopper plug-in to convert its JIRA tool from bug-tracking to an agile management tool for Scrum. “We don’t want to position Atlassian as an agile company," said Freeman. "To us, agile means what works right and best for your team. Each organization adopts agile methodologies differently. Let them adopt them in whatever fashion they like.”


Related Search Term(s): agile


Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33523
 

Add comment


Name*
Email*  
Country     


  • Comment
  • Preview
Loading