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Moving With Agility


By David Rubinstein
November 15, 2006 — 
Most development organizations are familiar with services architectures, composite applications with swappable components, and continuous tests and builds.

These are different ways of saying essentially the same thing. Applications need to be flexible so that businesses can react quickly to changes in their markets, whether seizing new opportunities or minimizing the effects of downturns.

Development organizations have begun to move away from monolithic applications that take months or even years to create, and then months more to implement new features or correct problems. So, too, have they begun to move away from the development processes and practices used to create those monoliths. They are becoming, in a word, agile.

A recent survey put together by Version One—a company that sells software that helps manage agile development projects—found that the respondent organizations have been practicing agile development at some level for 1.9 years.

The survey was completed by 722 respondents representing software organizations large and small; 79 percent said they work in organizations with 100 or more developers, and 84 percent said agile has been adopted at some level within their organization.

The survey found that the “initial champion of agile development” in these organizations was the VP/director of development—a change from the days when agile came into organizations through developers.

To go with this change, the survey also found that Scrum is now the most closely followed agile methodology. Scrum, explained Robert Holler, CEO of Version One, is focused more on management and less on specific disciplines. “There’s a direct correlation between who’s leading the charge for agile within these organizations and the methodology they’ve chosen.”

This marks quite a change from the days when the terms “agile development” and “eXtreme Programming” were thought to be interchangeable. XP called for programming in pairs, minimal up-front design and analysis, and realizing that change is a constant.

In a larger environment, though, there are concerns about too little planning, a lack of documentation and a loss of management control. In fact, 20 percent of the survey’s respondents said “lack of up-front planning” was their organization’s greatest concern regarding agile adoption.

Further, the study shows the greatest barrier to increased adoption of agile practices in organizations is a lack of people with the requisite experience in agile development to make it a success. Running a close second is the dreaded “general resistance to change.”

Holler said it might be that the development tools in use within organizations are a hindrance, rather than a help, to facilitating agile development. “Requirements morph. If the tools don’t, they’re perhaps not as useful as a wiki page that I can edit constantly, or a spreadsheet I can add columns to,” he said. “The tools might add too much structure.”

In the next year, Version One plans to integrate components into its V1 platform for testing, code management and continuous integration, effectively enhancing the platform for Agile ALM. “In ALM, ‘requirements’ is heavy. ‘Test’ is heavy. We manage requirements, tests and tasks in a lightweight way.”

The survey respondents rated 29 percent of their non-agile development projects “somewhat successful” or “very successful.” On the other hand, their agile projects earned ratings in these categories of 89 percent. Increased productivity, reduced time-to-market and fewer defects were cited as the top three benefits of agile development in the survey.

Clearly, agile development’s time has come.

David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of SD Times.


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