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Governance a key to successful agile adoption


By David Rubinstein
December 2, 2009 —  Forty-four percent of software development projects use some kind of agile techniques, according to Scott Ambler, IBM’s practice leader for agile development. That’s occurring in organizations where development is distributed, in regulatory environments, and in places using CMMI to measure the effectiveness of their development processes.

But as these organizations scale, Ambler said, they’re finding that the mainstream rhetoric of agile development doesn’t hold.

To address this problem, IBM is publishing a white paper called The Agile Scaling Model (ASM). One of its goals is to get organizations “out of the scrum rhetoric and to look at the whole life cycle, from pre-project, to get a full handle on the complexity of agile software delivery.”

The lowest rung of the ASM is what Ambler called “core agile,” where the focus is on software construction. It is value-driven and delivers working software with every iteration.

Beyond that is “disciplined agile,” which expands on the Scrum concept of a value-driven life cycle. Software is delivered in a collaborative and self-organized manner, using an appropriate governance policy.

It is important that agile teams organize and govern themselves, conforming to an enterprise’s architecture and leveraging it in their projects, Ambler said. “This is an adoption challenge” for agile, he expounded. Governance efforts that are not designed for agile work are dysfunctional and often hamper or burden project teams. “It’s about enablement, not command and control,” he said.

Many organizations are using a mix of agile and more formal, heavy processes, and governance must be done in different ways, he said. “You get different artifacts and metrics at different points in time, and a single governance policy for all will hurt each of the teams.”

The third rung of the ASM is the “risk-value life cycle,” where risk is explicitly defined and mitigated up front. It is here where stakeholders define the project’s scope and what they mean by value, and where the architecture is proven out by building a skeleton of the system, reducing technical risk, Ambler said. According to a November blog post, “Disciplined Agile Delivery,” these steps also help with transitioning to agile, allowing traditional funding models to use these milestones before moving to the finer-grained iteration-based funding that agile allows.

Finally, the top level of ASM is “agility at scale.” Ambler said there are eight complexity factors to agile development: geographical distribution, team size, compliance requirements, domain complexity, organization distribution, technical complexity, organizational complexity and enterprise discipline.

Organizations “will work differently depending upon where they are in the spectrum” of agile development, Ambler said. “Organizations have to recognize that one process doesn’t fit all.”

He advocated the adoption of lean manufacturing principles by software development organizations, because he said they provide guidance for scaling agile efforts.

For more of Ambler’s thoughts and ideas on agile, read his “Agile Mythbusters.”


Related Search Term(s): agile


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