Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

State of the IT Union Survey January 2010: Chance to win "The Art of Scalabilty"

ScottAmbler Tags: survey 4,813 Views

As you may know I write the agile update newsletter for Dr. Dobb's Journal (DDJ). One of the things that I do for DDJ is run the "State of the IT Union" surveys to find out what IT professionals are actually doing in practice. I invite you to fill out the January 2010 edition of the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/StateOfITUnion. The survey should take you about 5-7 minutes to complete, and your privacy will be completely protected.

At the end of the survey you will be given the chance to be entered into a draw for one of ten copies of "The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise" by Martin Abbott and Michael Fisher published in December 2009 by Addison Wesley.

The results of this survey will be summarized in a forthcoming newsletter, most likely my March 2010 agile update. Furthermore, this is an open survey, so the source data (without identifying information to protect your privacy), a summary slide deck, and the original source questions will be posted at www.ambysoft.com/surveys/ so that others may analyze the data for their own purposes. Data from previous surveys have been used by university students and professors for their research papers, and hopefully the same will be true of the data from this survey. The results from several other surveys are already posted there, so please feel free to take advantage of this resource.

The 5Ps of IT

ScottAmbler Tags: spi agileadopt adoption 8,955 Views

Just like there are 5Ps of marketing, there are also “5 Ps” of IT:

People. People and the way they work together have a greater effect on the outcomes of a project than the processes they’re following or the products (tools and technologies) that they’re using. People issues include having visible executive sponsorship, building an environment of trust, empowering staff, focusing on leadership as well as management, recognizing that the primary gating factor when improving processes is people’s ability to absorb change, and promoting a cross-discipline strategy at both the team and individual levels.
Principles/philosophies. We’ve found both internally within IBM as well as with many of our customers that there is a need to define a common set of principles to provide a consistent foundation to enable effective teamwork and continuous process improvement. These principles help to guide people’s decisions when their processes and practices don’t directly address the situation which they find themselves in.
Practices/patterns. A practice is a self-contained, deployable component of a process. You might find the IBM Practices interesting.
Products. This includes the technologies – such as databases, application servers, networks, and client platforms – and tools such as integrated development environments, testing tools, and project planning tools used to create solutions for stakeholders.
Processes. The previous 4Ps do not exist in a vacuum, we need some sort of glue to help piece all of this together. Minimally this glue is a lifecycle although more often than not it is a full process or method.

My experience is that to be successful at software process improvement (SPI) across your entire IT department that you must address these 5Ps. How you address each issue, and to what extent, will vary based on your situation.

Tragic Mistakes When Adopting TDD

ScottAmbler Tags: agileadopt tdd design specification requirements agile testing 7,867 Views

My January 2010 DDJ Agile Update, Tragic Mistakes When Adopting Test Driven Development (TDD) , is now online. In the article I summarize what I consider to be common, and tragic, mistakes that I'm seeing organizations make when they attempt to adopt TDD.

These mistakes include:

Not providing sufficient training, education, and mentoring
Not supporting pair programming
Not reducing the creation of non-executable detailed speculations early in the project
Not reducing the confirmatory testing being done by their independent QA/testing team
Completely reducing initial requirements envisioning and architecture envisioning
Completely reducing parallel independent testing

The article also goes into potential benefits of TDD as well as potential challenges that you're face when adopting it.

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