What does "Agile Development" mean to you?
Feb. 5th, 2014 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeur[Not strictly aimed at programmers, this time -- I'm interested in hearing from anyone in the software field who has an opinion.]
I was in an interesting discussion on one of the Scala mailing lists last week, and we wound up off on a tangent about "Agile". My correspondent described how he strongly dislikes Agile, and why -- and the interesting thing to me was that his definition of Agile not only didn't match mine, it was in some ways directly *contradictory* to mine.
I've been starting to realize that, 15 years into the process-management revolution in software, the term "Agile" has become ever-squishier. This hasn't been helped by management consultants who sometimes spout complete nonsense, or more often take a specific dialect of the idea and say "This is what Agile means".
So here's a quick question, aimed at my many techie friends: what does the word "Agile", in the context of software development, connote to you? What are the two or three *most important* aspects of it? I'm not looking for answer just from the experts here -- I'm at least as interested in the viewpoints from the people who have only been reading about it in the trade press or blogs, and what impressions you have gotten. And I'm curious whether the viewpoints and priorities differ between, eg, the programmers and the project managers.
(I have strong opinions about this myself, of course -- I've been an active proponent of some of these ideas from almost the beginning. But I'd rather hear your viewpoints first, before I spout off...)
I was in an interesting discussion on one of the Scala mailing lists last week, and we wound up off on a tangent about "Agile". My correspondent described how he strongly dislikes Agile, and why -- and the interesting thing to me was that his definition of Agile not only didn't match mine, it was in some ways directly *contradictory* to mine.
I've been starting to realize that, 15 years into the process-management revolution in software, the term "Agile" has become ever-squishier. This hasn't been helped by management consultants who sometimes spout complete nonsense, or more often take a specific dialect of the idea and say "This is what Agile means".
So here's a quick question, aimed at my many techie friends: what does the word "Agile", in the context of software development, connote to you? What are the two or three *most important* aspects of it? I'm not looking for answer just from the experts here -- I'm at least as interested in the viewpoints from the people who have only been reading about it in the trade press or blogs, and what impressions you have gotten. And I'm curious whether the viewpoints and priorities differ between, eg, the programmers and the project managers.
(I have strong opinions about this myself, of course -- I've been an active proponent of some of these ideas from almost the beginning. But I'd rather hear your viewpoints first, before I spout off...)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-02-05 10:47 pm (UTC)4. A good way to track progress on a story. I have yet to see this.
I spent an *enormous* amount of effort at Memento, a few years back, coming up with a comprehensive list of Agile-development tools. It eventually transpired that supporting Team Foundation Server was a requirement, and we settled on Urban Turtle. Never regretted it -- it was a very good tool, and continually improving while we were using it. (I pushed us into it while it was still in Beta, and we used it for a couple of years.) It's only good for TFS, but it does solve many of TFS' worst warts.
(And there are other standalone options -- for example, while I didn't use it in practice, I rather liked the look of ScrumNinja.)
That said, you can only do fine-grained story tracking if you have adequately fine-grained Tasks -- if you do, keeping track of them is nicely easy. And you only get good Tasks iff the developers are sufficiently invested in the process. So as always for Agile processes, culture has to come first...