Integration Watch: Lost in the divide: Agile architecture



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December 1, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 2)
The agile movement, as most readers know, was founded in response to the perceived need for an approach to software development that could easily accommodate change. It was designed in opposition to the so-called waterfall model, which favored an extensive design cycle that imposed fairly unchanging requirements and designs. It often delivered products to customers that were out of sync with the users' needs due to the evolution of those needs during the development period.

At its inception, the movement was not about techniques, but about principles. However, extreme programming (XP) was one of the most established agile practices of the time, and for many years XP practices and agile approaches shared a great deal of overlap. In fact, it would be fair to say that XP provided the body of practices with which agile could come into being. XP and agile would later on become more distinct, but early on they were essentially congruent.

XP, as the P implies, is focused on low-level work. There are 12 core practices in XP. Seven of them are exclusively about coding-related work: pair programming, test-driven development (TDD), refactoring, small releases, coding standards, collective code ownership, and system metaphors. The remaining five barely hover over this low level: planning game (weekly iteration planning), whole team, continuous integration (building the code repeatedly), simple design (use Occam’s razor, where possible), and sustainable pace. This makes XP a great solution if only your coding/implementation pipeline is faulty. But experience tells me that often sites with faulty processes suffer from problems far further up the pipeline than what can be addressed by TDD or CI.

For these problems, you need to go to a different branch of agility: the one that focuses on process, design and team interaction. This higher branch is characterized by lean development, kanban and to some extent Scrum. (Scrum is sort of a wobbler; it can be viewed as high-level or low-level, but lean is a genuine systematic attempt to bring agility to the larger process flows where development teams first become bollixed up.)



Related Search Term(s): agile

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