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A Concrete Agile Practices List
Finally, I found out what someone actually thinks “agile practices” are. In “What are the Most Important and Adoption-Ready Agile Practices?”, Shane-Hastie presents his list:
Kudos to Shane for putting his list out there.
Ya gotta love all the “explicit definition of done” entries (“Aren’t you freakin’ done yet?“). And WTF is “Up front architecture” doing on the list? Isn’t that a no-no in agile-land? Shouldn’t it be “emergent architecture“? And no kanban board entry? What about burn down charts?
Alas, I can’t bulldozify Shane’s list too much. After all, I haven’t exposed my own agile practices list for scrutiny. If I get the itch, maybe I’ll do so. What’s on your list?
Agile Overload
Since I buy a lot of Kindle e-books, Amazon sends me book recommendations all the time. Check out this slew of recently suggested books:
My fave in the list is “Agile In A Flash“. I’d venture that it’s written for the ultra-busy manager on-the-go who can become an agile expert in a few hours if he/she would only buy and read the book. What’s next? Agile Cliff notes?
“Agile” software development has a lot going for it. With its focus on the human-side of development, rapid feedback control loops to remove defects early, and its spirit of intra-team trust, I can think of no better way to develop software-intensive systems. It blows away the old, project-manager-is-king, mechanistic, process-heavy, and untrustful way of “controlling” projects.
However, the word “agile” has become so overloaded (like the word “system“) that….
Everyone is doing agile these days, even those that aren’t – Scott Ambler
Gawd. I’m so fed up with being inundated with “agile” propaganda that I can’t wait for the next big silver bullet to knock it off the throne – as long as the new king isn’t centered around the recently born, fledgling, SEMAT movement.
What about you, dear reader? Do you wish that the software development industry would move on to the next big thingy so we can get giddily excited all over again?
King Of The Hill
Scrum is an agile approach to software development, but it’s not the only agile approach. However, because of its runaway success of adoption compared to other agile approaches (e.g. XP, DSDM, Crystal, FDD), a lot of the pro and con material I read online seems to assume that Agile IS Scrum.
This nitpicking aside, until recently, I wondered why Scrum catapulted to the top of the agile heap over the other worthy agile candidates. Somewhere online, someone answered the question with something like:
“Scrum is king of the hill right now because it’s closer to being a management process than a geeky, code-centric set of practices. Thus, since enlightened executives can pseudo-understand it, they’re more likely to approve of its use over traditional prescriptive processes that only provide an illusion of control and a false sense of security.”
I think that whoever said that is correct. Why do you think Scrum is currently the king of the hill?
Related articles
- The Scrum Sprint Planning Meeting (bulldozer00.com)
- Scrum And Non-Scrum Interfaces (bulldozer00.com)
Tell Me About The Failures
As the world’s rising population becomes more and more dependent on software to preserve and enhance quality of life, efficiently solving software development problems has become big business. Thus, from the myriad of “agile” flavors to PSP/TSP, there are all kinds of light and heavyweight techniques, methods, and processes available to choose from.
Of course, the people who acquire fame and fortune selling these development process “solutions” seem to only publicize success stories. In each book, case study, lecture, or general article they create to promote their solution, they always cite one or two concrete examples of wild success that “validate” their assertions.
Besides the success stories, I, as a potential consumer of their product, want to hear about the failures. No large scale software development system is perfect and there are always failures, no? But why don’t the promoters expose the failures and the improvements made as a result of the lessons learned from those failures? Humbly providing this information could serve as a competitive differentiator, couldn’t it?
The difference between a methodologist and a terrorist is that you can negotiate with a terrorist – Martin Fowler
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