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Agile Process Showcased at IT Architect Event
10/25/2007
"We're getting developers to test," he said. "Can you imagine ten years ago predicting that developers would demand to test -- they'd think you're crazy. Yet that is the state today in the agile community."
If you have more and more IT projects, you will need to have an IT governance process in place. However, if you let the bureaucrats define the governance process, which is what has been happening for a couple of decades, then you'll have a bureaucratic governance process. Ambler said you can get an effective governance process if you let the people who are good at software development, who are good at IT, define it.
One agile development tenet is to have self-organizing teams, but that doesn't mean you don't plan. The agile process is planned, but it's done on a just-in-time basis.
"Never let anyone tell you that agile developers don't plan," Ambler said, adding that agile developers simply don't waste time up front with modeling.
You don't want to be doing detailed models anymore. Tests are a significantly better way to specify details than models. Still, the majority (93 percent) of agile developers is doing whiteboard sketching -- they're doing a little bit of modeling, Ambler said.
Finally, developers just aren't good at estimating projects, Ambler said. However, one effective agile management technique is something called "planning poker." Essentially, planning poker is a method of estimating project length by team members where they literally pick a card. It helps motivate developers and get them to work out the reasons for their varying estimates.
Kurt Mackie is online news editor, Enterprise Group, at 1105 Media Inc. You can contact Kurt at kmackie@1105media.com.
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