State of Agile

October 9, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

Seems like there's lots going on in the agile world right now. Lots of talk about Lean and it's impact on Agile. Lots of attacks going on at the CSM certification. Kanban is all over the news these days. And just last week, I read about a new Agile methodology called Stride.

So how do we make sense of this all?

My opinion is that there is value in each of the methodologies (for the purposes of this blog I'll refer to them all as methodologies even though some of you might not think of them as such). It's real important to read about them all so that you are armed with enough knowledge to know what's out there. I see this as a toolset from which you can choose for your specific situation.

In order to illustrate ....

Scrum is a methodology and process that provides the mechanisms for teams to learn and adapt. Scrum however doesn't say much about the meaning of DONE and how to accomplish that. That's where XP comes in. XP has great practices around engineering discipline. It teaches us all about craftsmanship and producing quality work. I personally cannot see anyone practicing Scrum without at least some elements of the XP toolset. Be it pair programming, TDD, ruthless refactoring, emergent architectures etc.

Lean on the other hand is way more philosophical, but they have great teachings. For example, recognizing that work-in-progress is a liability is huge. If you start to think like this, you're going to minimize work-in-progress and as a result you will improve overall cycle time. With Lean, people come first. What effect does this have on your organization? Well happy teams make happy customers, better quality software, improved work culture.

And Kanban? Well Kanban helps teams with flow (i.e. cycle time, throughput etc) and almost eliminates the need for traditional sprints which I won't get into here (subject for another discussion). So many teams are using kanban boards for controlling the workflow of tasks or stories, or both.

Scrum has also been said to have problems with scalability and cross site development shops. Well Stride in it's infancy (not even sure you can call it an accepted methodology yet) has adapted Scrum to provide capabilities for better handling these sort of situations.

So what do you do?

Well in my opinion Scrum provides the best overall process or mechanism to manage agile project. It's a good base to start with and I would definitely start with Scrum. But you can't go it alone with Scrum. You have to pick and pack from other methodologies till you get what works for you.

I think Agile is evolving and most likely wont stop. And why should it. I want us to get better at it. And there's so many smart people thinking about how to make software development better. I can't wait to see what it will be like in 5 years from now.

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