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Agile Methodologies

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Wednesday, 12 October 2011 00:00
august-09-databigYou might think all agile methodologies are the same. Aren't they all agile, after all?

They are not. And, Charles Suscheck has a fascinating article contrasting his team's experience using first Scrum and then their transition to kanban. Please do read "A Productivity Comparison of Kanban and Scrum" and let him know what you think.

We are fortunate to have an article from Shvetha Soundararajan and James D. Arthur, "Assessing an Organization's Capability to Effectively Implement Its Selected Agile Method." Many organizations select an agile method without looking back to see if that approach is effectively implemented. This article helps us know if we are successful with our selection.

Last month, Brian Bozzuto discussed knowing what done means so you can know if a story is ready for release. This month, Mike Pearce takes on knowing if a story is ready for any work at all in his Definition of Ready article. That should help the malformed story problem I see on teams.

Roman Pichler challenges us to think differently in his article "Innovate Successfully by Creating a Lean, Minimal Product," which was in editing before Steve Jobs' death. We may not always think about how much we can take away and still have something useful.

Finally, we have Arin Sime's "Don't Discard Test-driven Development" in the Cloud. I think of TDD as an advance agile practice that I would love to see more teams adopt. As I visit more teams, I see more experimentation with TDD, but no more wholesale adoption. Maybe as more organizations move toward the cloud, they will take Arin's advice. In some ways, cloud computing makes TDD more necessary because your risks are even higher. I hope you enjoy this month's Agile Journal. Please let me know if you have comments.

Johanna Rothman
Technical Editor
Agile Journal

 
Featured articles...

A Productivity Comparison of Kanban and Scrum
by Charles Suscheck
Scrum is a great agile management framework for iteratively developing complex software systems, and it works well in many circumstances. Certain problems can arise, however, such as a highly fluid product backlog, which make kanban's emphasis on backlog flexibility a more attractive alternative. Software experts like David Anderson, Corey Ladas, Dean Leffingwell, and Linda Cook point to small, loosely coupled user stories with an experienced agile team as key factors for productivity gains using kanban.

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Assessing an Organization's Capability to Effectively Implement Its Selected Agile Method
by Shvetha Soundararajan and James D. Arthur
The agile philosophy provides an organization or a team with the flexibility to adopt a selected subset of principles and practices. However, more often than not, these customized approaches fail to reflect the agile principles associated with the practices. Organizations often lack the supporting environment to effectively implement the adopted methods, which result in the benefits afforded by agile methods not being fully realized. 

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Definition of Ready
by Mike Pearce
Development teams use the idea of a definition of done (DoD) to decide when they think a user story is ready to be shown to the stakeholder for review. The DoD is like a bouncer or doorman, ticking technical criteria off on a list before the story is allowed in to party.

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More articles...
Adapting Innovate Successfully by Creating a Lean, Minimal Product
by Roman Pichler

To create a new product, we have to peek into the future and state what we believe our product will roughly look like and do. For anyone not blessed with perfect foresight, predicting the future correctly is notoriously difficult. After all, the only thing certain about the future is that it is uncertain! No market research technique can deliver a forecast that is 100 percent accurate. And in the case of disruptive innovations, it's not possible at all to make a sound prediction, as Clayton Christensen observes in his book The Innovator's Dilemma: "Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed." Investing in a new product always involves risk. We may have targeted the wrong market segment, envisioned the wrong product or the wrong features, or the market may have changed by the time the product is launched.

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Don't Discard Test-driven Development in the Cloud
by Arin Sime

Writing software for the cloud can be very different from writing software that runs on a single server. It can make test-driven development (TDD) more complicated, but it is still well worth doing. For the purposes of this article, I'll consider two types of software development in the cloud: cloud hosting and distributed computing.

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Last Updated on Wednesday, 12 October 2011 15:41
 
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