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Patterns & Practices West 2006: The Tao of agile
By Jack Vaughan
“For me agile -- with a little ‘a’ -- is as much about philosophy and how much you believe in making decisions as anything else,” Microsoft Patterns & Practices group Software Development Lead Peter Provost told TheServerSide.NET. Provost spoke about Agile methods – and agile methods - at this week’s Patterns & Practices West Conference in Redmond, Wash.
With Agile software development, groups try to develop software in short time frames, or iterations. Quick iterations are intended to reduce over-analysis in early software development stages. Testing early and often is also a key to Agile development, as described in the widely circulated Agile Manifesto.
As people review what it means to develop software with agility, and as the notion of improved methodologies (what some call “Agile 2.0”) is heard in some quarters, it is important, says Provost to continue to focus on the basic philosophy of agility in planning and development.
To that end, Provost and co-presenter Michael Puleio, Patterns & Practices team member, did a Patterns & Practices presentation that was created ‘on the fly.’
Start at zero and iterate
Provost’s and Puleio’s presentation was set up as an eXtreme Programming [XP] jam session, with quick iterations. “We start at zero and let people in the audience tell us what it is they want to learn. Then the whole group prioritizes the list for discussion,” said Provost, who employed an impromptu [human-based] applause meter to “stack-rank” the list.
The session was then split into four 10-minute iterations to cover issues of estimation, requirements gathering and the like.
How you allow the velocity of one iteration influence the velocity of the next iteration was considered. Another discussion centered the challenges of selling agile approaches, or how get customers involve.
What of so-called “Agile 2.0?” Is it possible that efforts to improve agile results could ladle on too much complexity, turning agility into clumsiness?
The initial agile push dealt with certain sets of problems, but it didn’t address all problems equally well, he suggested.
Said Provost, “Agile 2.0 is yet another [attempt] to differentiate things - to enhance older learnings with more recent learnings.”
He asked: “Does this run risk of changing what agile is?”
Perhaps. “You can start out with a process that intends to be agile, but not end up with what you are trying to achieve,” said Provost.
Maturity and pragmatism
We asked Provost for his analysis of where the software profession is, now that we are five or so years into the Agile software movement. “If you look at Agile software movement, there has been a bit of a religious type of thinking that has grown up around it,” he noted. But that could be changing. “I think we are reaching a state of a bit more maturity, where people are getting more pragmatic about what ‘agile’ is about,” he continued.
At heart, Agile development, he said, is “about putting together teams of bright people and removing obstacles.” Provost noted, however, that this is not about software development for software development’s sake; it is about making software that “leads to the most value to the business.”
In Provost's terms that means the development process should ensure that “developers understand what it is that needs to be done next.”
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