Agile development! What’s Up?

Apr 5, 2010 by admin    No Comments    Posted under: Tech Sambar

I have seen people talking loudly about Agile development… but do they really get to what is Agile?

A thought! Its nothing but a set of values which provides ways to build good software , cheaper , faster and much better in an unpredictable development environments. Scrum!

This word is always mis termed with Agile. Its something where you concentrate on of the four values set below largely.

1. Client side requirements may keep on changing over a period of time and its impossible to know much when its at beginning of stage, though we must be able to keep with the track of changes. Hmm in much better way….. keep on driving, there are no curves… its just flat.

2. How about working in an environment where we cannot guess whether what to be done in upfront. Issues can range from technology , cost , time and team capability.

3. At the end of day, creating a higher value for your customers.

How to Achieve this?

I still remember when i was working for Mail management for my client down the road in 2003. It was fun and we adopted a strategy to finish it off in different style.

1. Interaction between the customer and developers. Agile can work only if there is a collaboration and to make it more effective a serious paradigm shift in their business policies in either end won’t hurt.

2. A small team does not need much motivation, but what about a large project with big team. The creativity and innovative thinking of developers need to be harnessed which can happen only through empowered self-organizing, cross-functional teams working in an environment that fosters transparency, mutual trust, informal face-to-face communication, team-play and accelerated learning.

3. I personally feel if we have to deilver a high end product to customers, then why not apply ourself to Iterative Software Development. Teams may require new engineering skills that include things like refactoring, test driven development , continous intergation and automation.

4. I am no project Manager! To achieve Agile project Management, there must be a change in the way we manage our teams and projects. It includes providing right resources , right working environment , the right support and the guidance.

To get further intensified in this, Agile teams don’t have fixed roles. Everyone does everything. That means as time goes on in an Agile shop, you will naturally be exposed to every team member’s expertise. I am not arguing with the traditional way of approach where everyone works in just their one little corner, and never sees what happens in other corners. This isn’t denigrating it; many fine projects are built on assembly lines.

An Agile team mean ” WE, ” everything belongs to everyone and the responsible comes in everyone’s shoulders for what needs to be done. There is nothing so called ” Its not my code dude or not my problem ” in an Agile process. A better example is changing a few lines of code without refactoring it entirely and it can affect the whole project. In Agile development there is not much room for analyst, where one sits in chair and tells what to code, You need someone willing to write code.

At the end of valley all i speak is No one is allocated cent percent to a process… but everyboy is dedicated cent percent to the project.

Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!