Interesting article in CIO magazine a few months back about a Forrester report that found 35% of IT professionals describe their process as ‘Agile’ and 46% that say they are at least Agile in spirit.
I think this meshes up well with what I’ve seen in the industry. In my job, I get to talk to lots of different clients across a wide range of industries, technologies and locales throughout the US.
Interesting, the conversation though can sometimes go something like this…..
“What type of software development methodology do you use here?”
“We consider ourselves an Agile shop. Our iterations are 3 months long”
So a half-empty kind of person would sigh that they are probably only Agile in moniker, but I’m a half-full kind of guy.
The above statement tells me two things about the organization (generally the conversation has to go a little longer for me to make a call – so I’m jumping ahead a little for sake of brevity in this post ;-).
1. They are aware of Agile, but are not really experiencing the benefits of Agile; specifically a short iteration duration (1-3 weeks) that allows real time course correction, generates sustained sense of urgency, etc, etc.
2. They take pride in being forward thinking and WANT to use Agile because they know there is undisputed benefit when used properly.
The second statement is the one that I absolutely love to hear in our clients. Because I know that they truly have been doing software development for a while, but more importantly that they are conscious about always trying to improve and embrace change for the sake of improvement. That is a client I love working with. The open-minded kind that knows where they want to go, and isn’t afraid to challenge their partners to help get them there.
Bruce Lee once said, “To practice without a conscious attention to improve is an exercise in futility” (I’m sure he lifted it from Confucius or someone, but I’ll stick with Bruce for the ‘cool factor’).
I think software development is the same as any endeavor; physical or mental. You have to practice it with a constant, conscious attention to improve. Agile embeds this into the methodology itself through several practices such as retrospectives and daily team synch-ups.
Ten years ago, I remember a client VP of Development that was ‘interested’ in Agile, but knew nothing about it, wanted me to explain to him in simple terms why they should move towards a more Agile development model. I thought about it for a while and said, “Let’s say you tasked a team of very experienced, passionate developers with a project and put them all in a shoe box giving it a ‘shake’ to trauma the cobwebs out. If you waited a while and then peeked inside the box without their knowing – they would be using Agile”
In other words – it’s a natural process that we developers have gravitated towards for years. In fact – I personally recall being an architect / developer on a project about 13 years ago that was clearly being run as classic waterfall. But on a daily basis, my cube-mates and I would pull our chairs to the center aisle with our morning coffee and do a 15 minute synch-up. We’d use code and proto-typing to express new ideas. We’d built good relationships with the business users and invite them over for demos to make sure we were getting it right, and we boiled the ‘book thick’ requirements documents down to ‘cliff notes’ that we all worked from. And we tested code every day with automated harnesses that we built so we could regression test faster. (which gave us time to go snowboarding in the morning). None of us had heard the word ‘Agile’ before. It just seemed the best way to satisfy our own self-interests of being rock-stars. Of getting the job done. Of making the users happy and making our dates without killing ourselves.
Of course when the ‘very classic waterfall Program Manager’ came by, we dutifully told her that we were in ‘Design / Code’ phase (or whatever the 1000 line MS project schedule said we should be doing) and we gave our updates as % complete at a task level. Everyone was happy, nobody got hurt and the project by the way was delivered on time and on budget. I swear I’m not making this up – call me and I’ll divulge names off the record 😉 In fact I can think of examples that stretch back even further than that.
So I recognize now that with Agile being mainstream, I’m no longer a ‘rebel ‘boarder dude / coder’. But I’m ok with that. Things that are cool have a tendency to move mainstream over time. Snowboarding, cyclo-cross, YouTube, Macs, tattoos 😉 And while that mainstreaming of something that was once ‘edgy’ can make us feel ‘old’ – it’s nice to at least seem valuable things move in that direction…… well…… perhaps tattoos have gotten out of hand 😉
Here’s to progress!
