As I speak with many, many companies for an upcoming story on ALM, I wanted to share some insight from some of the folks I've been talking with. We are taking a look into how agile development is affecting the way application life-cycle management companies deliver their products, and one thing that EVERYBODY is agreeing on is that 100% of their customers are at the very least thinking about adopting agile processes.
Development teams are adapting to shorter cycles with software that allows everyone involved to keep up to speed with what everyone else is doing.
“In the old days, we would be able to wait for the Monday meeting to get status updates,” said Richard Leavitt, executive vice president of worldwide marekting at Rally Software. “Well, in a two-week iteration, there’s only two Mondays, so you could never wait to find out that, say, a big defect has just gotten reported. Now, everyone has real-time feedback and updates.”
Paula Rome, a product manager with Seapine, added that nowadays, QA testers will sit in on meetings with builders and other members of a development team, which wasn’t always the case in traditional development environments.
“It’s forcing your team members to talk more to share more, and it’s sort of a thought-changer,” Rome said of agile. “People are thinking about quality from the beginning. I think the best agile teams are making sure they know what will make their user stories successful. It might be performance issues, it might be load issues; you don’t get away from that in a good agile process.”
But while agile is catching on like wildfire in today's software development world, it took some time to become the talk of the town. Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud, said this was because it's alot easier to get people interested in new tools than it is new processes.
“Part of what takes a thing like agile some time to get adopted is, I think, naturally, we want to buy a tool, not a process," he said. "So if I hear about this thing called agile, I’ll say well, 'Where do I buy the agile software package?' It’s a little difficult to get people to change their processes."