Agile Thinking, Everywhere
By Jennifer deJong
January 1, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Agile practices have influenced how non-agile teams carry out software development tasks. Here’s a look at how agile thinking has influenced each step:
Write software in short stints, followed by customer feedback. This is the central concept of agile development. The team focuses on delivering a narrowly defined feature of the software, in a predefined time period, often two weeks. Virtually all development teams have been heavily influenced by this idea, said Brian Carter, a vice president for the consultancy Sapient. “Even clients that aren’t aware of agile are asking for some demonstration of progress on a short-term basis.” That’s a far cry from earlier days, when developers routinely got away with saying, “I’ll show the clients [what I’m working on] when I decide to show them,” said Greg Reiser, a vice president for the consultancy ThoughtWorks. Short iterations are intended to surface problems early in the project, allowing developers to receive and respond to customer feedback. “If you aren’t closely working with the client, you don’t know if you are doing the right thing,” said Wendy Friedlander, a software developer for the cable network Oxygen Media. Of course, no team makes an overnight leap from no communication for nine months, to two-week iterations, followed by detailed feedback. But there are clear signs developers everywhere have been influenced by the iterative approach, said Michael Vax, CEO for Luxoft Canada, a consultancy. “We see a lot of people move from nine-month release cycles to three months.”
Define application requirements incrementally. Agile development recognizes that not every requirement can be known at the project’s outset, said Bob Schatz, head of consultancy Agile Infusion. “It focuses on capturing the highest-priority features of an application first, instead of gathering all of them up front.” This is a significant change in thinking for developers, who have traditionally viewed changing or new requirements as a disruption to the process. Because the transition to the gather-requirements-as-you-go approach is difficult, teams typically take small steps first, said Tom Stiehm, managing architect for consultancy Command Information. They develop a big vision up front, and write a lot of requirements related to that vision. But they don’t flesh out the details of the requirements until they are about to fulfill them. “That isn’t agile development, but it is agile thinking.”
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