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Agile Development in IT and Beyond - June 2007
Now that companies have achieved success using Agile processes on IT
projects, they are looking for ways to leverage these experiences
elsewhere in the organization. The core values of individuals,
interactions, customer collaboration, and responding to change are
important to solving business problems -- even when working software
isn't the ultimate product. Agile practices are  enabling management,
product development, procurement, academic, and other types of
organizations to improve the quality of their work and be responsive to
their businesses' ever-changing needs.
This month's Agile Journal explores the use of Agile processes in a
variety of contexts. Mishkin Berteig and Garry Berteig share three
different examples of how Agile processes can be effective outside the
typical software development domain. Kevin Parker considers the impact
of Agile processes on key organizations outside of development,
particularly the program management office (PMO) and IT operations. To
achieve 'harmony' on an Agile team, Ross Pettit argues that the IT
organization must engage its business partners and ensure that the
business can consume the frequent changes that Agile development
promises.
IT must also face the realities of the business culture and legacy
practices. John Elie shares how a hybrid Agile approach helped his
organization, Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC), gain
funding for the re-engineering of mission-critical loan management
applications and change the working relationship between business and
IT staff. Guy Beaver offers some best practices for Agile teams to
"keep their eye on the prize" - the happy customer - by delivering
value to the business through their software.
Basic Agile values as articulated by the Agile Manifesto
remain important for any type of project. From the measurement
perspective, Ahmed Sidky presents his Agile Adoption Framework, a
structured and repeatable approach to guide and assist agile adoption
efforts. In Part II of his article ( Part I
was published in May 2007 ), he discusses how to use the framework to
guide agile adoption initiatives. And Neil Fox maintains that building
the right team is the key to a successful Agile team, especially for
global teams. Staffing considerations need to take a front seat in
every manager's plans.
What do you want to see in the Agile Journal? Clearly, the industry's interests are diverse - just look at the upcoming Agile 2007
conference agenda and see the incredibly wide range of topics. Please
share your experiences with the Agile Journal community. Send us your
suggestions for new themes or issues to cover. If you'd like to
contribute an article on this or another upcoming topic, go to the
"Letters to the Editor" in the forum at AgileJournal.com and send us your ideas.
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Editor in Chief
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Why Use Agile Processes Outside of IT?
Instead of asking "why," companies are asking "why not?" use Agile approaches outside of the software development organization. In this time of hyper-changing businesses and global competition, pragmatism is essential. Many Agile practices lend themselves to solving challenging problems, regardless of the context. This is not to say that Agile processes are the next silver bullet; we know that this will never be true. But it is encouraging to see how and where ...
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Stories of Agile Work
These days, most people associate the word "agile" with "software development." However, people are applying the basic ideas of agile methods outside this type of work. Here are three stories of agile methods used in situations that are not in the context of software development. They illustrate how agile methods can be stretched to serve well in other contexts. From these and other examples, we have come to understand that agile methods consist of seven core prac...
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Agile Lessons From "I Love Lucy"
An old "I Love Lucy" episode shows Lucy and Ethel working at a candy factory. Their job is to take pieces of candy off a conveyer belt and put them in packages. At first everything goes well. Lucy and Ethel have this candy packaging thing down pat. Alas, things start to change. The conveyer belt sends out candy faster and faster. At first Lucy and Ethel try to cope. They try to work faster. Then their work gets sloppy. Finally, rather than packaging the candy at all, they resort to thr...
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 | Eye on the Prize: Best Practices for Aligning Agile Efforts with Business Goals
A phrase heard often in Agile discussions is "let the product lead." Applied correctly, these four words powerfully focus an Agile team's energy directly on work that provides the highest business value. Traditional engineering practices that focus on process often divert a technology team's energy away from quick delivery of business value, and toward design of infrastructure and architecture. Deep focus on technology decisions breaks the line-of-sight with busine...
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 | A Disciplined Approach to Adopting Agile Practices: The Agile Adoption Framework, Part 2
A number of years ago we predicted that by 2007 or 2008 agile adoption would be on the rise and that the agile community would be in need for a structured approach to help it with its agile adoption efforts. As a result, we invested time, effort, and money to develop an efficient and effective approach to guide and assist those who want to adopt agile practices. Last month we started to see our prediction become a reality when the tentative program for the Agile 2007 conference was posted online...
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 | The Agile Organization
When successfully adopted, Agile practices create hyper-efficient application development teams capable of regular, and even aggressive, delivery of business value. While an exciting prospect for developers, there will not be much business impact if the rest of the IT organization, and indeed the business itself, can't make use of this new-found efficiency. Staffing and resource decisions need to be made efficiently, requirements captured quickly, testing and production environments in...
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 | Global Agile Development: How Investing in the Right Team Impacts Long-Term Rewards
Many software development organizations are electing to implement Agile development methodologies in order to take advantage of the cost, quality, and time-to-market benefits commonly achieved with this approach. At the same time, these organizations are moving software development offshore to take advantage of greater scalability and "round the clock" development cycles. However, in combining these two efforts, the highly collaborative nature of Agile is tested as teams are faced wi...
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 | CASE STUDY: Using Agile Software Development at the Educational Credit Management Corporation
This paper outlines an adaptation of Agile development based on a pilot project at the Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC), a mid-sized non-profit corporation in the student loan guarantor industry. To support the re-engineering of mission-critical loan management applications, ECMC needed to modify Agile development methods to incorporate up-front project estimates to gain funding approval. IT also needed to redefine the traditional working relationship with its busines...
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| FEATURED BOOK |
 | FEATURED BOOK: Lean Software Strategies: Proven Techniques for Managers and Developers
by Peter Middleton and James Sutton
Lean Software Strategies seems to be one of the first books specifically about applying Lean principles and techniques to software development that is not written by the Poppendiecks. When the book first came out, I admit I was put off by several unfavorable reviews at Amazon.com. When I later learned it won the 2007 Shingo prize for excellence in manufacturing research, and saw Lisa Crispin's review at StickyMinds, I decided to give it a second look. I...
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