bliki tagged by: agile
Agile2010
Last week I attended the Agile 2010 conference in Orlando. Agile 20xx is the major US agile-oriented conference whose roots go back to XP Universe and the Agile Development Conference. I've not been a regular attender of the main agile conferences, but I did go last year as well. Rather than make an attempt at a consolidated description, here are a few scattered impressions.
16 August 2010
AgileCertification
Should there be a certification program for agile methods?
30 April 2004
AgileImposition
According to the current board of the Agile Alliance, agile methods have "crossed the chasm" , which I think means they are becoming more widespread. While this has its advantages, it also brings problems. As a methodology or design approach becomes fashionable, then we see a lot people using it, or teaching it, who are focusing on the fashion rather than the real details. This can lead to reports of things done in agile's name which are a polar opposite to the principles of movement's founders.
2 October 2006
AgileVersusLean
I'm thinking of using agile software development - but should I use Lean software development instead?
26 June 2008
CodeAsDocumentation
One of the common elements of agile methods is that they raise programming to a central role in software development - one much greater than the software engineering community usually does. Part of this is classifying the code as a major, if not the primary documentation of a software system.
22 March 2005
CraftmanshipAndTheCrevasse
Dan North's recent blog post on software craftsmanship has unleashed a lot of blog discussions (which I summarize below, if you're interested). There's a lot in there, but one of his themes particularly resonated with me, hence this post.
19 January 2011
EarlyPain
A few years ago I was talking with a client who told me something he didn't like about the agile approach we were using: "it's doesn't feel right to have these difficulties this early in the project". Contrary to his reaction, in my mind this early pain is one of the great benefits of an agile or indeed any iterative development process.
4 November 2008
FixedPrice
Many people belive that you can't do a fixed price contract in an agile project. Since the whole point of an agile process is that you cannot predict the future, this isn't an unreasonable supposition. However this doesn't mean you can't come up with a fixed price agile contract, what it really means is that you can't come up with a fixed scope contract.
29 July 2003
FlaccidScrum
There's a mess I've heard about with quite a few projects recently. It works out like this:
- They want to use an agile process, and pick Scrum
- They adopt the Scrum practices, and maybe even the principles
- After a while progress is slow because the code base is a mess
29 January 2009
IsAgileForAll
Can average developers use agile methods?
4 April 2004
PairProgrammingMisconceptions
A bunch of common misconceptions about pair-programming.
31 October 2006
PleasingTheCustomer
All agile methods stress the importance of direct interaction between the developers of a system and customers who are its eventual beneficiaries. The agile manifesto said "Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project", which is there to stress the high frequency of interaction. Extreme Programming stresses this through its practice of OnsiteCustomer.
15 August 2003
SchoolsOfSoftwareDevelopment
For nth, and I'm sure not last time, I'm sliding into a conversation about defining practices, labeling some of them as "best", and probably the C-word (certification). It's a familiar discussion, and although we've barely started it, I can predict much of where it will go. It's driven by a perfectly reasonable desire to identify who are the better software developers, and how existing developers can improve their abilities.
12 April 2008
TeamRoom
A common thing you find in agile projects is that the development team sits in a single open team room. It was advocated early on in Extreme Programming and called out as one of primary practices in the second edition. Agilists favor a open team room as it promotes lots of informal and deep communication between people on the team.
14 June 2010
AgileAustralia2010
Scattered impressions from my recent trip to Australia for the Agile Australia conference.
27 September 2010
AgileHandover
One of the most common questions I see about agile projects is how they deal with handover to another team. If you have a development team that leaves and hands over support to a support team, how do they cope when agile projects tend to produce much less documentation than plan-driven processes?
28 May 2004
AgileManifestoMeeting
The meeting at Snowbird Utah in 2001 that decided to use the word 'Agile' and began the 'Manifesto for Agile Software Development'.
C3
C3 was the short name of the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation project, a payroll project at Chrysler which has since become famous as the 'birth project' of Extreme Programming.
ConversationalStories
Here's a common misconception about agile methods. It centers on the way user stories are created and flow through the development activity. The misconception is that the product owner (or business analysts) creates user stories and then put them in front of developers to implement. The notion is that this is a flow from product owner to development, with the product owner responsible for determining what needs to be done and the developers how to do it.
4 February 2010
CustomerAffinity
When someone is looking at what makes up a top-class enterprise software developer, often the conversation may turn to knowledge of frameworks and languages, or perhaps the ability to understand complicated algorithms and data structures. For me, one of the most important traits in a programmer, or indeed in a development team, is something that I'll call Customer Affinity. This is the interest and closeness that the developers have in the business problem that the software is addressing, and in the people who live in that business world.
28 July 2006
FeatureDevotion
A common, perhaps dominant, practice of agile methods is to develop a list of features (often called stories) for the software that's being built. These features are tracked with index cards, work queues, burndown charts, backlogs, or whatever your tool of choice is.
2 November 2006
FixedScopeMirage
Many companies like the idea of writing a contract that fixes scope and price because they think it lowers their risk. The mirage says that their financial obligation is fixed at the price of the deal. If they don't get satisfactory software, then it won't cost them.
30 September 2004
FrequencyReducesDifficulty
One of my favorite soundbites is: if it hurts, do it more often. It has the happy property of seeming nonsensical on the surface, but yielding some valuable meaning when you dig deeper
28 July 2011
LargeAgileProjects
A common question is whether large projects can be done with agile techniques. After all many agile approaches are designed for smaller projects and the heavyweight ideas that they resist are more needed on bigger projects.
10 May 2003
PeopleOriented
One of the most difficult things for many people to understand about agile methods is the people orientation of agile. Those who are interested in agile processes all agree that process is a second-order effect on project success. The first value of the agile manifesto is that Individuals and Interactions are more valuable than Process and Tools.
12 January 2004
RigorousAgile
I often run into a complaint that agile methods don't have a rigorous definition. The complainer may talk about how this means that you can't tell if a particular team is using an agile method or not. They may also say that this makes it hard to teach people how to do agile methods - what's the curriculum?
29 May 2005
SpreadingIncrementalism
From time to time people question whether a particular specialty can be used incremental way: "You can't do (security | user interface design | databases | internationalization | * ) with an agile project because this aspect has to be done up front."
5 January 2005