Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

The SEMAT vision has recently been posted online.  SEMAT is short for Software Engineering and Method and Theory (SEMAT) and I am one of several signatories and a provider of input into the effort. 

There are several reasons why I'm involved with SEMAT:

1. The industry clearly needs something like this.  Ivar Jacobson has been writing and speaking for awhile now about how our industry behaves in a similar manner to the fashion industry -- we lurch from one cool idea (the fashion) to another and few of us observe that the current fashion is often just a rehash of fashion(s) from the past.
2. The right people are involved.  The SEMAT initiative has attracted a wide range of industry experts, including both the old guard, the new "agile guard", and people in between.  Arguably we may be short a few people, the data community isn't well represented and I'm not sure we have the systems community covered well, but we can address those challenges in time.
3. We'll achieve something.  We may not pull of the entire vision, but we are going to produce something of value and I hope that it has a positive impact on the industry.  Time will tell.

I have several thoughts about the SEMAT vision which I'd like to share with you:

1. The vision is coherent.  A lot of reasoned effort went into it's development as you can see when you read it.
   
2. It will be a challenge to identify a non-trivial kernel.  Even developing a kernel language will be hard as people will often stick to their preferred terms.  For example, is it an iteration, a sprint, or a time box?
3. Practitioners may not notice.  It will also be a significant challenge to get practitioners interested in the SEMAT effort and more importantly to leverage the material.  For example, the patterns community has a long history of producing great work which for the most part is ignored by the vast majority of practitioners, with the exception of a handful of the hundreds of patterns out there.  So, although SEMAT is likely to produce some great ideas, will anyone care?
4. Academics may not notice.  I suspect that this will be less of a problem than practitioners not noticing, but it's still a possibility. 

Next steps:

1. Position papers from many of the signatories, including myself, will soon be published at the SEMAT site.   Several non-signatories have been invited to submit papers as well.
2. A workshop is being held in the third week of March in Zurich.  At this workshop the people who published position papers will flesh out our ideas.
3. I'll blog about these things as they occur.