2011 Trends and Outlook

Though it is good to glance now and then in the rear view mirror our main focus should be looking forward.

It has been 10 years since the signing of the Agile Manifesto in Snowbird, just outside Salt Lake City, Utah.  Much has happened in the world of agile-lean product (system-software) development in the 10 years since.

It goes without saying agile-lean product development has gone mainstream and is now in what I am calling the globalization stage of its lifecycle.

The topic for this month’s edition of the Agile Journal is “2011 Trends and Outlook”.

Mario Moreira in his article, Sunny with a Chance of Agility – Agile Predictions for 2011, cleverly and insightfully focuses his predictions on:

• Job security with Agile credentials
• More structure with Agile deployments
• Agile Tooling goes ALM

Dele Sikuade in his 12 part series, to be presented throughout 2011, will be examining the twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto; one principle per month during 2011. Though Dele has a great deal of admiration for the ideals that are expressed in the twelve principles he postulates they are misstated and are therefore widely misunderstood.

Dr. Ian Mitchell presents the second article in his two part series, PRINCE2 and Agility: Gearing for Balance. In last month’s article we looked at some of the problems that are commonly associated with agile methods when they are viewed in the context of process rigor. In this month’s article we will explore in more detail the remedial, standards-based approach adopted by Codeworks DEV.

Badri N Srinivasan is his article, Agile in the Blue Ocean, discusses the parallel between new customers being created in the Blue Ocean as explained in the Blue Ocean Strategy and the new relationships being generated and renewed when implementing agile methods as part of your software development life cycle; as the customer may still be the same but the subsequent relationship with the customer which is created will be different.

Geoffrey Bourne in his article, The Marriage of Lean, Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP): How to Align Agile Across an Organization, describes why he believe that we are on the verge of inventing a new way of looking at Agile: a maturation and simplification of Agile from numerous processes to a few or even one.

Ryan Fogarty in his article, Postmodernism in Software Development, discusses if we believe in the philosophy of postmodernism, we should also trust in the philosophy of agile software development. The belief in knowable truths, more than anything else, signifies the modern age and as we move into the future, technology presents us with a more dynamic environment that will force us to question prior assumptions.

In my article Agile Software Development – Past, Present, Future, I reflect upon and leverage what we know about and can learn from the past and present system-software development approaches and propose an updated version of the agile manifesto, based on today’s reality.

Kevin Parker in his article, Agile Lessons From "I Love Lucy", cleverly present how successfully moving to agile methodologies can significantly decrease the amount of time it takes to turn a business idea into software. But, he goes on to say this transformation must reach beyond application development. The PMO, IT Operations and even the business will need to change to make sure these changes are put into, production without disrupting operations.

I am looking forward to our journey together in 2011.

Take care.
Your agile buddy and editor,
Russell Pannone
Editor
Agile Journal