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Developers can learn a lot from other industries. As a thought exercise, is it possible to build a passenger aircraft using agile techniques?
Forgetting cost for now; how feasible is it to use iterative and incremental development for both the hardware (fuselage, wings, etc) as well as software, and still come out with a working and safe product which meets the customer’s requirements at the time of delivery?
Does it make sense to refactor a plane?
Agile in software and Agile in manufacturing are really quite different, although they share similar principals and values.
Agile in manufacturing emerged in Japan in the 1950s. Read up on W.E. Deming and the Toyota Production System to find out more. It's all about constantly improving the process whereby a product is reproduced.
Agile in software evolved in the early 1990s as a rapid development model. It's all about constantly improving the product.
You can certainly build a plane using Agile manufacturing methods, I've no doubt that some already are. Anything built in Japan definitely will be as Agile manufacturing is very well established there (it's taught in primary schools).
You couldn't build a plane using Agile software methods because you can't afford to rapidly change the product - in software changes and mistakes are cheap and reproduction is free. This isn't the case for aviation.
You could design a prototype plane using something like Agile software methods - but it would have to be standardised in order to be reproduced (a design task in itself).
How would you work using Test Driven Development? Would you automatically build and test a plane every iteration? Would you be able to make a ten minutes build? How easy is to make changes to the airplane? Even if you are really flexible in your desing the building some components need to be sent to special factories so there is not inmmediate feedback.
From de design using CAD software you need to make a mould, take the piece of fiber, put it in the plane. Etc. So here a trivial change has a non trivial cost. In Agile you can make a very little change and have it tested, built and an ready to ship in 20 minutes. If small changes are expensive then the short development cycle and refactoring won't be so usefull. Your feedback can take longer than a week so there is a strong reason for thinking in advance like in the waterfall model. And every attempt has a cost in physical materials unless you are programming. The Idea is not new. Carpenters measure twice. Programmers just first code and then test.
In summary. There may be some similarities but it will definitively be the same.
I'm going to say "kind of". In fact there's one example right now that I think is pretty close to answering this question.
Boeing is attempting to do this now with the new 787 - see following: Boeing 787 - Specification vs. Collaboration (From the 777 to the 787, the initial specifications document supposedly went from 2500 pages to 20 pages with the change in technique.) Suppliers from around the world are working independently to develop the components for this aircraft. (We'll call this the "teams".)
So, I want to say yes, but at the same time, iterations in creating the aircraft has resulted in delays of 2+ years and has resulted in stories like this one - (787 Delayed for 5th Time)
Will the airplane ever get built? Yes, of course it will. But when you look at the rubber hitting the road here, it seems like "integration test" is having one heck of a time.
Edit: At the same time, this shift in technique has resulted in building a new breed of aircraft built out of entirely new materials that will arguably be one of the most advanced in the world. This may be a direct result of the more Agile approach. Maybe that's actually the question - not a "can you?" but a "if Agile delays complex systems, does it provide a more innovative product in the payoff?"
Toyota pioneered Lean Production which Agile methodoligies followed on from. For the building of the hardware of the aircraft lean production would be the way to go and for the software an agile methodology would be the way to go.
Pick the right tools for the job.
A great book following how TPS was created and works
http://www.amazon.com/Machine-That-Changed-World-Production/dp/0060974176
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
I think in this case you are thinking too big. Agile is about breaking things down into more managable pieces and then working against that. The whole idea of Agile (XP in particular) is that you do your testing first so that you cut the number of bugs out and because plane software needs to have a very high code coverage for its testing it fits in quite neatly I think.
You aren't going to 'refactor' the mechanics of the plane but you will tweak them if they are unsafe and thats the whole iterative approach for you.
I have heard of Air Traffic Control software written with Agile Methodologies pushing it forward.
This is taken from http://requirements.seilevel.com/blog/2008/06/incose-2008-can-you-build-airplane-with.html
***Actually, that’s not true,***
My first guess - this probably relates to some of the core differences between systems and software engineering. I am going to over simplify this and just say that it is about scale. Systems projects are just a superset of software and hardware projects, integrating and deploying some combination of these. The teams of people deploying systems projects are quite large. And many of the projects discussed here are for government or regulated systems where specification and traceability is necessary. I could see how subsets of systems projects could in fact be developed using agile (pure software components), but I’m not convinced that an entire end-to-end project can. To put this in context, imagine you are building an airplane - a very commonly referenced type of systems engineering projects. Can you see this working using agile?
All skeptism aside, I do think that iterative development most certainly could work well on systems projects, and most people here would not argue that. In fact, I would love it if we could find examples of agile working on systems projects, because the number one feeling I get at systems engineering conferences is a craving for lighter processes.
I decided to do a little research outside the conference walls, and low-and-behold, I found a great article on this exact topic – “Toward Agile Systems Engineering Processes” by Dr. Richard Turner of the Systems and Software Consortium. The article is very well laid out, and I highly recommend reading it. He defines what agile is and what he believes the issue why most systems engineering projects are not agile. For example, he suggests that executives and program managers tend to believe that the teams involved have perfect knowledge about systems we are building, so we can plan them out in advance and work to a perfect execution against a perfect schedule.
Agile Can Work With Complex Systems
He talks to how to the agile concepts can work in systems projects. Here are a few examples summarized from his article:
Learning based: The traditional V-model implies a one-time trip through, implying one time to re-learn. However, perhaps the model can be re-interpreted to allow multiple iterations through it to fulfill this.
Customer focus: Typically systems engineering processes do not support multiple interactions with the customer throughout the project (just up front to gather requirements). That said, he references a study indicating the known issues with that on systems projects. Therefore, perhaps processes should be adapted to allow for this, particularly allowing for them to help prioritize requirements throughout projects.
Short iterations: Iterations are largely unheard of because the V-model is a one-time pass through the development lifecycle. That said, iterations of prototyping through testing could be done in systems engineering in many cases. The issue is in delivering something complete at the end of each iteration. He suggests that this is not as important to the customer in large deployments as is reducing risk, validating requirements, etc. This is a great point to rememember the airplane example! Could we have even a working part of an airplane after 2 weeks? What about even the software to run a subsystem on the aircraft?
Team ownership: Systems engineering is very process driven, so this one is tricky. Dr. Turner puts the idea out that perhaps allowing the systems engineers to drive it instead of the process to drive them, while more uncomfortable for management, might produce more effective results.
There is this story of an aircraft engine plant (September 1999). Their methods seem quite agile:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/28/ge.html
Yes, you could do it. If you followed Agile Software Development techniques too closely however, it would be astronomically expensive, because of the varying costs of activities.
Consider the relative costs of design and build. If we include coding as part of the software design process, then design is definitely the expensive part and build is ridiculously easy and cheap. Most Agile projects would plan to release every few iterations at least. So we can work in small iterations with a continuous build process. Not so easy when you have to assemble a plane once a fortnight. Worse if you actually plan on "releasing" it. You'd probably need to get the airworthiness & safety people on to an Agile process too.
I'd truly love to see it tried.
Yes, you can use agile techniques for building complex systems, but I don't know if I'd use it for this particular system.
The problem with aircraft is the issue of safety. This means every precaution needs to be taken, from correctly identifying and interpreting the requirements to verifying and validating each and every single line of code.
Additionally, formal methods should probably be used to make sure that the system is truly safe by making sure the programming logic is sound and satisfies its conditions properly.
I'm fairly certain the answer is irrelevant. Even if you could, you would not be allowed to. There are too many safety requirements. You would not even be allowed to develop the flight software using Agile. For instance, you do not have a Software Requirements Specification (SRS) in Agile. Yet, for any avionics software onboard an airplane that can affect flight safety you will need an SRS.
Of course one can refactor a plane.
When one refactor, one modifies the source code, not the binaries. With a plane it's exactly the same thing: one modifies the blueprints, not the plane itself.
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Looking for work at the moment, I'm seeing a lot of places asking for Agile experience, but until I get a job with a team that is using Agile, I suspect I'll never get the experience.
Is it possible to adopt Agile methodologies with just one person?
Sort of answering my own question, there's similar questions at :-
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1407189/can-agile-scrum-be-used-by-1-or-2-developers
(I guess I should get better at searching.)
You seem to be coming at this from a work experience point of view; if you are looking to build relevant experience to get you a job on an agile project I would probably think a little more laterally.
Firstly could you work with others, maybe on an open source project? That would be a good opportunity to try out agile methods with others who may have more experience.
Secondly, you could look at using some of the common techniques or tools, even if it's just to learn how the tools work - e.g. you could set up a continues integration server to run builds and unit tests when you check in code. If you are working on your own you won't gain much in terms of productivity by doing this but you would gain some skills and have something relevant to say to future employers which would indicate you are committed to the agile style.
Yes
Check out PXP or Personal Extreme Programming.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1593127
Summary from the paper:
Personal Extreme Programming (PXP) is
a software development process for a
single person team. It is based on the
values of Extreme Programming (XP)
i.e. simplicity, communication,
feedback, and courage. It works by
keeping the important aspects of XP
and refining the values so that they
can fit in a lone programmer
situation. PXP can still be refined
and improved. It is in the tradition
of XP practitioners to vary XP to
encompass whatever works. We hope
that PXP inherits these pragmatic
roots, as well. Giving up XP tenets
like pair programming is not
necessarily a tragedy. We still
believe that following XP strictly is
a more effective way to pursue
multi-person projects. But we are also
convinced that many of the XP
practices and methods can be applied
to individual work. The PXP
approach tries to balance between the
"too heavy" and the "too light"
methodologies. PXP will inject the
right amount of rigor for the
situation without overburdening the
team with unnecessary bureaucracy.
Yes - it is possible to do many agile practices as an individual.
If you already know how to do these, you can do them as a sole developer:
test-driven development - great place to start
refactoring
continuous integration
doing the simplest thing that could possibly work (and evolving it through refactoring)
automated deployment
planning meetings (a team of one plus customer)
Things you can't do on your own:
pair programming
CRC/RRC workshops (... you'd have to talk to yourself quite a lot)
Pair programming would be hard this way :)
Let's check Agile Principles:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
You can do all of those things even while working on some personal project alone. You can use also GTD while working alone, you can develop your product through iterations, you can adopt timeboxing, you can ask some family members or friends to do usability tests with you (and this works really well).
As a conclusion, you can really get tons of Agile experiences alone. I strongly recommend you to read some books first tho, as some of principles can be easily misinterpreted.
Some aspects can be done alone: running a product backlog and using a task board come to mind. See what the secretGeek is doing.
Of course some cannot: pair programming, scrums etc...
I recently interrupted a big project. It was a medical software project. While working on it, I realized some patterns about solo programming. I want to share my experiences here:
Your software's working logic must always reflect the real world. You catch fish with fishing rod, not baseball bat; so forget it.
Always start building from the project element to which all other elements refer. That makes sense if you think that like the function in a software project which is called at most. That might be database modeling. It would be useless if you model data access layer first, before modeling database.
Never mind changing variable names. That's the most written entry in a programmer's diary; so no need to be ashamed.
Methodology changes the world. Make worth of it. Make every single logical process with a function or procedure. When project gets huge you will understand thats the best way.
If you're not designing a language compiler in assembly do not hesitate using huge procedure call chains in which one calls another and that calls another and so on. Use methods everywhere, nearly resemble every single entity with classes and be modular.
Modularity is everything. Set modularity your primary goal. Have i said it is everything meanwhile?
Last word for beginning the project. If you're building an apartment you install main entrance at last. But when using, you enter the building from entrance. Be aware.
These are some of my design principles I learned and learning day by day. I hope having been useful. Do your best.
While some Agile practices are directly targeted at more than one person teams, they are just practices, they are just a mean, not an end. I mean, Agile is not about doing pair programming, stand up meetings, etc. Agile is about maximizing the customer value while minimizing waste to provide the most optimal ROI. Agile is business oriented, practices are just a way to achieve this goal in a given context. So, back to the initial question, it's definitely possible to adopt Agile practices (that make sense in your context) to maximize the delivered value: continuous planning, limiting Work In Progress, Stop-the-Line culture, time boxing, high quality, just enough specifications, just enough and just in time documentation, etc, etc.
Definately. Agile is very flexible in terms of how many people are involved. Some methodologies, like Scrum, focus mostly on doing as much as possible in a limited time, like two weeks (sprints). That includes whatever you want it to. If your team requires QA, then that is part of it. As a loner, you decide what you want to include.
After the scrum sprint, you look at what you could have done differently to get more done, and move to the next one.
Some other methodologies focus more on getting features done in each iteration, say three small features developed, tested and refactored.
As you can see, there are tons of ways to apply agile to any project. You decide which aspects you want. Though obviously one integral part is doing things in small increments.
Yes
XP/TDD scales from one to one thousand. Pair programming is optional.
YES.
Agile is more of a state of mind than just a methodology of software development like waterfall.
Scrum is one of the very popular agile methodologies. You can study below aspects of scrum in detail:
Benefits of Scrum/Agile over Waterfall
How can you create better "products" with Scrum/Agile
What are the types of projects better suited for Scrum
Pros and Cons of Scrum
Scrum Rituals and why are they necessary (What advantage do they
bring)
Different roles in scrums and their responsibilities (Scrum Master,
Product Owner and Development Team)
After you have good understanding of working of scrum and its benefits, try to create a pet project.
You will have to play all the roles yourself. You can try to distinguish between what role you are playing currently by wearing different colored hats for each role.
Example:
Product owner : Think from product perspective, what should be the features in the product and why would they be important for your users etc. Then proceed with all the scrum practices.
Scrum Master: Keep checking if you are following all scrum rituals in the right sense and spirit and are you able to derive benefits out of it.
There will be limitations,example you cannot have Daily stand-up meeting, obviously because you are the only person in the project. But if you follow above, you should be good to secure a job and play your part well in the team.
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I have been looking at different programming methodologies: Scrum, waterfall, spiral but someone told about one called Object-Oriented. Now as far as I know that's a paradigm and not a methodology.
If it is a methodology can someone please explain how it differs from Agile or waterfall?
Well, Google found some traces of such a beast which is clearly describing a methodology-like thing:
This document aims at introducing briefly to the readers the Object Oriented Methodology (OOM). Information covered in the document includes a brief overview of the OOM, its benefits, the processes and some of the major techniques in OOM.
OOM is a new system development approach encouraging and facilitating re-use of software components. With this methodology, a computer system can be developed on a component basis which enables the effective re-use of existing components and facilitates the sharing of its components by other systems. Through the adoption of OOM, higher productivity, lower maintenance cost and better quality can be achieved.
This methodology employs international standard Unified Modeling Language (UML) from the Object Management Group (OMG). UML is a modeling standard for OO analysis and design which has been widely adopted in the IT industry.
The OOM life cycle consists of six stages. These stages are the business planning stage, the business architecture definition stage, the technical architecture definition stage, the incremental delivery planning stage, the incremental design and build stage, and the deployment stage.
But this thing didn't spread (likely) very far. Maybe you should ask your contact for some references.
Object Oriented programming is a programming technique used when writing code. This is something different from a methodology which is a way of planning, managing and implementing a software project.
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming
Apples and oranges. OO is a way of designing code. Scrum/waterfall/spiral, etc... are about how you manage a project. They're independent of each other.
That said, you really should look into OO.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some authors published work (especially books) with titles and blurbs including the word "method" or "methodology" in them; these works focused on object-oriented modelling approaches, explaining in detail the modelling primitives (metamodel) that one should use to construct structural and dynamic models of systems. Their treatment of the process to follow, however, was minimal. Later, they were criticised by applying the term "methodology".
Nowadays, "methodology" is usually thought of including a process aspect, a modelling (or product) aspect, and a people aspect, at least. The modern methodologies that were built on the tradition of those 1980s-1990s works that I mentioned above are often called "object-oriented", because the modelling approaches that were used then were, in fact, object-oriented.
Actually, it is a debated topic in research circles whether the process aspect of a methodology is substantially different depending on the modelling aspect of said methodology. For example, is the process aspect of an object-oriented method very different from the process aspect of an agent-oriented one? If you think it isn't, then the term "object-oriented methodology" may make no sense to you.
Object-orientation is an entire iterative methodology, with each stage used to validate or expose holes in the previous. It covers everything from identifying ALL stakeholders, requirements elicitation from them all, documenting the requirements in Use Cases (not part of the original O-O methodology, but adopted when Jacobsen joined Booch & Rumbaugh at Rational & UML merged in his Objectory), Analysis of the requirements begins once they had been validated with text-based Use Case documents the stakeholders can understand. Analysis is still in the business problem space, not the software solution space. Architechure & System-level Design are the first steps in creating the solution space for the identified business needs. The tasks can then be broken up and Low-level Design and Programming, implementing the Design via the case hierarchy originally created during Analysis and refined in System Design in UML Case/Object diagrams is finally handed off to the coders. One hard-and-fast rule in OOADP is that the Analysis and Design artifacts are baselined BEFORE coding is allowed to begin. Any changes that the business or marketing departments want during coding MUST be submitted to a Change Control Committee, dominated by Development. They will prioritize requested changes, evaluate their effect on the canonical class hierarchy and distributed design, determine how much extra time, money, and resources each change will impose, and go back to the business & marketing people and say - "This is the cost in time, money, and resources. Are you willing to accept the cost?" If not, the change may be discarded or moved into the next release. When you design an enterprise-sized project, you only really get that one chance at creating its skeleton of the class hierarchies. The later you try to modify the systems and have to modify classes and dependencies, the more likely you are to incur extra expenses, time delays, requirement needs - and bugs. Often subtle bugs in areas you had formerly regression-tested to hell and gone.
Agile people used to refer contemptuously to the full OOADP methodology as "BDUF" (big design up front). Scrum is designed to be the antithesis of this, with 5 or 6 programmer teams working with only one Product owner who is responsible for business/customer needs, and knows only a keyhole view of all requirements, occasionally bringing in other SMEs as she identifies a need or gap. Tasks are written out as "stories" (that is a bit of a simplification - they can be any one of several forms of requirements or requirement changes) on 3x5 cards and are tackled a small group at a time, with the intention of finishing each group by the end of a 2 or 3 week "sprint." Undone tasks are put back in the backlog of stories, an analysis is done to determine the state of the piece of the project this team is responsible for, and some of the remaining stories are passed out for the next sprint. Business & marketing LOVE Agile as much as they HATED O-O because they can insert new or altered stories or Use Cases, or other forms of requirements almost to the end of the development stage. The final product keeps changing to meet what business & marketing see as quickly shifting needs and time windows (usually hysterically exaggerated). The various little stovepipes caused when you scale a project up to more than one Scrum Team are dealt with using periodic Scrums of Scrums, where the Scrum Masters of the teams get together and try to keep every team on the same tracks and determine if any teams have backlog items that block progress within another team. The bigger the project, the more bureaucracy is added to coordinating all these teams, each subtly changing their original mandate as stories are updated or new ones added.
I've worked with O-O since the original CRC cards and Wirf-Brock refinements all the way through today's iteration of UML. I even spent several years as part of a four-man team from Bell Labs, teaching O-O and C++ to AT&T development teams. I've also worked with Agile (mostly Scrum and ScrumBan, a merger of Scrum and Japanese Kanban). I have used Agile Scrum since 1998, before there was an official standard. Agile is only a partial methodology, so every project has to find other tools or methodologies to fill in the gaps. I've seen thing get REALLY ugly if the teams were not made up of 1st-level ScrumMasters and all expert developers, cross-trained in each others' skillsets. Corporations today have made rates so low, that most of the truly gifted programmers I worked with 15 or 20 years ago are doing something else for a living & getting their coding jollies working on mobile apps or open source projects. You rarely see a truly talented team. Companies hire people without the necessary 10x "rock star" skills for some of the roles, and Scrum teams can be erratically staffed. Also, the more you try to scale Scrum for larger projects, the more problematic the results and the more the department begins to shed canonical Scrum rules, looking for some hybrid that works better.
Agile is, as its early proponents first said, excellent for doing maintenance, enhancements, and smaller non-time-boxed projects and I've seen it used very effectively. However, for a corporate enterprise project that is not driven by the fickle winds of marketers and business people's hysteria about slight changes in an external market's needs or time windows, I'll take O-O every time.
Whenever I'm presented with a contract opportunity that has both Object Orientation and Agile in the same set of requirements, I run the other way.
Back in the day people believed that Object Oriented programming was going to solve world hunger. I suspect that now agile is going to do that, they've lumped them together :-)
Seriously though, although some people took object oriented design to the status of a design methodology - identify actors & behaviours in a formal way to develop the design, it is really a set of principles about how to design software. It certainly isn't a methodology for managing the development of software projects like Scrum and agile might be.
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What are the myths or misconceptions related to Agile?
There are lot of misconceptions related to Agile that an average new comer may fall into. What are the misconceptions in the Agile world and how do you justify that it is truly a misconception?
Update: Summary of Agile Myths
Agile doesn't allow documentation
Agile methods do not scale
Agile means no plan
TDD covers all the unit testing needs
Pair programming always results in better code
Agile is a silver bullet solution to software engineering problems (There is a silver bullet solution)
Agile doesn't need up front design
We're doing scrum so we don't need to do TDD, Refactoring Pair Programming, etc.
One can learn Agile from a book
Agile only works for trivial projects
Agile always uses "User Stories"
Read the following answers for more information about above myths and for more myths.
"Working software over comprehensive documentation" means you do not need a functional spec...
Wrong!!! It just means that you can iron out the wrinkles iteratively with the users - speaking as a vendor, you still need good documentation to assist with the QA and sign-off phases...
"We're doing Scrum - so we don't need to (pair | refactor | do TDD | ...)" Actually the Scrum founders - Ken and Jeff have been saying that all the high-productivity scrum teams implement the full range of Extreme Programming practices.
Test-driven development won't find all the bugs / isn't easy to apply to everything - so we're not going to try! - Learning TDD isn't an "all or nothing deal" and you get better at judging what to test and how to do it efficiently. I've been doing it for ten years now and I'm still finding better ways to do it and new things to consider.
I can learn all I need to apply agile methods from a book. - You need to learn by doing and that often means coaching and meeting other people that can help. Lots of things go wrong when people just try to learn it from a book.
Hysterical (and quite real) "The candidate must take direction from, and support the scrum master" (From a job spec I was sent last week...) - The scrum master isn't supposed to tell people what to do. He/She is there to facilitate - i.e. to help the team learn to sort things out themselves. It's a massive failure mode - having a scrum master that "commands" people!
Talking about "the agile methodology" - big cluelessness indicator. Firstly, talking about "agile" like it's a specific thing whereas it's a very vague umbrella terms for many different things. Secondly, use of "the" agile methodology - there are loads of them, and loads of different ways of doing many of them! Thirdly, a lot of people in the agile community got here in the backlash against the big, heavy UML-laden methods of the nineties. These people don't tend to use the word "methodology"...
You need especially talented people to develop software the agile way. Jeff Sutherland says that they considered using the "chief programmer team" model for managing teams in banks - but found they didn't have anything like enough "chiefs". Scrum is designed to get best productivity out of a lot of moderately able programmers. In fact removing one, disproportionately productive team member that doesn't want to help the others can "unblock" the mediocre team members and bring their combined productivity up to more than compensate for the super-productive former team member... That's what Jeff says anyway...
There are quite a few other XP-related ones that we came up with in an open space workshop that I led recently: http://xpday-london.editme.com/WhereHasXpGone
Myth: using Agile development practices is a silver bullet solution to software engineering problems.
Myth: Test-first development forces your project to have adequate unit testing.
Fact: Many developers get lazy, and the unit tests they write before their code are often weak and inadequate.
Myth: Pair programming always results in better code.
Fact: Programmers tend to be slightly anti-social and to have significantly different thought processes from one another. Having someone breathing down your neck as you code is very unpleasant, and the result is often a tense work atmosphere with a reduction in both code quality and quantity.
Myth: Agile means no documentation
Fact: Agile value working software more than comprehensive documentation but this doesn't mean no documentation at all. Documentation should be written just in time, and just enough. And no, Agile doesn't say one should always using user stories. Use them if, and only, if they are appropriate!
Myth: Agile means no plan
Fact: Agile does not support development without planning. Agile uses continuous planning and estimating to maximize the ROI. Actually, Agile is about scope management.
Myth: Agile means no discipline
Fact: Agile developers must be more disciplined for success.
Myth: Agile only works for trivial projects
Fact: Agile (actually Scrum here) has been used for
FDA-approved, life-critical software for x-rays and MRIs,
Financial payment applications,
24x7 with 99.99999% uptime requirements,
Multi-terabyte database applications,
etc
Myth: Agile doesn't scale
Fact: Sutherland used Scrum in groups of 500+, Cohn used Scrum in groups of 100+
Myth: "No Big Design Up Front" means no design.
Myth: Waterfall always fails.
Reality: Most of the software you're using on your agile project was developed with waterfall. Even BDUF waterfall, in many cases.
There's no real myths - but anything taken to an extreme will be wrong. An Agile project that does zero design in the hopes of "designing as it goes" will likely fail. A Waterfall project that designs everything down to the last semicolon will likely fail due to budget, time or changed user requirements.
It has been repeatedly said "Agile design methods do not scale" whereas Agile development will effectively scale to any size if implemented and thought out properly.
Myth: You need to carefully plan and schedule each sprint.
This leads you to do lots and lots of up-front planning so that you can fully plan each sprint.
This leads you to defeat agility and create a waterfall called "Agile".
The biggest myth I have seen is that people think it is better than other development processes.
It is the usual silver-bullet snake-oil that we have been seeing in this industry for years.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/301993/is-agile-development-dead/302060#302060
Myth: Agile is always a better option when compared to other alternatives.
Fact: depending on project size, requirements (particularly flexibility of such), external schedule, and customer attitude, it may not always be more productive compared to orthodox methodology.
Myth: Agile means XP and Scrum
Fact: There are other practices like OpenUP, AMDD, etc.
It's easy to know what to charge your customer. This is alway the biggest problems for us, because we don't know the scope of the project we can't give the customer a fixed price, and most customers demands a fixed price.
Great thread. While I offer nothing new in my related blog post, I do illustrate the top two reasons why Agile fails when it does fail. 1) Lack of upfront requirements (taking the 'begin coding with incomplete requirements' to an extreme) and
2) Lack of adequate unit tests (because CHANGE will happen - and unit tests are the quickest way of catching all the breaking points resulting from the CHANGE).
http://www.anujvarma.com/BlogEngine.net/post/2010/11/03/Agile-versus-Flat-Footed-development.aspx
You're completely right that there are a lot of myths around Agile, some coming from outside, and others from inside. Here are a few more I thought of to add to the list:
"You don't need project managers or business analysts any more"
Although we're not doing BDUF and teams are self-directing, as things scale up there is still a need for people whose job is coordinating what's going on. And if you have a very complex business scenario, you may well need someone to help you make sense of it. IME, a lot of the projects that really needed PMs and BAs still need them (and those that don't need them now, probably never needed them!). But, of course, the roles of the PMs and BAs tend to be different in the Agile world, and that can make people uneasy.
"Agile can't be used for fixed price projects"
It can, but it is quite a bit harder. Especially since we all know that "fixed price" really means "fixed price, scope and time"...
"We don't do BDUF, we do it all as we go along"
The only way to work is JEDUF (Just Enough Design Up Front). Sometimes you need more, sometimes you can get by with less, but you don't do more than you need at that point.
Myth: Agile is anti-thetical to security.
Fact: This is only true, if you try to force a full-blown waterfall-style SDL (security development lifecycle) onto supposedly Agile teams. In fact, I have designed and implemented Agile-SDL variants in numerous organizations, and I can say that putting the Agile into the Security, can actually afford a higher, more robust level of security. it just takes a change of security mindset - from control to visibility and guidance.
If you don't show real value with agile, it will fail. And fail miserably as in bankrupt a company miserably. Going to agile just because it is 'agile' makes you look as silly as the CIO in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvks70PD0Rs
John
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I know that for me I first got started following the waterfall method of project management and along with that I went with the predictive approach to software design. In this I mean we had huge packets of documentation, UML, database schemas, data dictionaries, workflows, activity diagrams, etc.
Having worked in software for over 10 years now I find it to be much more realistic to approach software design from a Reactive approach. I frequently follow a scrum approach to project management and with that very little heavy documentation is ever generated. We have very little workflow specification (though they still have there use). This is a much more dynamic approach to software creation. Of course along with it comes frequent refactoring as time goes on as we find out new features over time that had we planned for up front would have changed things dramatically.
The big difference for us is that the first approach takes longer, seems to fail more frequently in a software construction world, and isn't nearly as flexible. The second approach provides more flexibility, makes us aware of failure faster (so we can course correct faster), and provides some form of functionality at the end of every iteration.
Knowing both sides from experience, I still find many people that LOVE the waterfall approach over the agile approach for software development. I don't get it.
question: Why would someone use waterfall over some form of agile with all of the research backing agile? What are strong arguments for using waterfall over agile?
When I started programming (with COBOL no less), waterfall was the "new" approach. Today, I'd tell you that I use a waterfallish agile methodology. For larger systems, I find a waterfall type start works best. Not creating huge documents (that's a waste of time IMO) but rather to take some steps like creating a UI prototype and/or use cases to get our heads around the business problem at hand. Once we are comfortable we have the problem scoped and we have a solid understanding, we move into an agile development mode.
To answer your question though, I think the big reason waterfall sticks around is many people don't like change. It's scary to change and moving from waterfall to agile is a big change.
I think that part of the reason why people still often cling to waterfall is that it gives the illusion of control. In a waterfall, you can do enough up front work to put together a beautiful schedule that nicely addresses every contingency that you can think of, and then give a detailed roadmap for the future to anyone on the business side who asks when feature X will be available.
The problem is that you can almost never follow that plan to the letter, and you are almost always late/dropping features. However from the upfront, it looks very controlled and manageable.
I'm a big Agile fan, but what I've always struggled with is the long range roadmap/forecasting that is often asked for by the sales and marketing folks. I think that the waterfall's illusion of certainty is very comforting to managers and business folks.
My boss tells me to.
I suspect many people have no choice and old bosses don't learn new tricks.
Not taking sides, but pretty much any research would be unscientific at best.
You say (emphasis is mine)
question: Why would someone use waterfall over some form of agile with all of the research backing agile? What are strong arguments for using waterfall over agile?
but don't link to any studies.
It's one of those things that are known to be extremely difficult to actually test. You can't have two identical teams work on the same project at the same time, because there's no such thing as two identical teams. You can't have the same team complete the same task twice in a row using two different methodologies without the first pass tainting the second. I've never heard of anyone designing an experimental (or even statistical) study that can convincingly argue for any software development methodology. I'd be interested to see one though, if you have a link.
Short of real evidence, it boils down to personal preference. What are the strong arguments for chocolate over vanilla?
I'll play devil's advocate and state that agile is flawed is nearly as many ways as the waterfall method is. I'm not one of those that love the waterfall method, but I don't love agile either.
My experience with agile hasn't been very positive. To be fair, I used it in a corporate environment, which paid lip service to "agile" while still expecting our manager to produce long term milestones and deliverables upfront.
However, I found that agile (scrum in particular) methodologies often disguise major problems with design. While waterfall gives managers the illusion of control, agile seems to do the same for development teams. I've seen teams where bringing up any issue that aren't in the current sprint/iteraton is frowned upon, with the expectation that it'll be handled "in time". It only requires a few major design decisions to be ignored for the project to go belly up in future, while current iterations go smoothly and project looks to be on track.
You can argue that the team's at fault for not understanding the spirit of agile, but I'd like to see better methodologies that incorporate the best parts of agile.
One of the premises of (at least) XP is that change is cheap. The waterfall model was built on the principles that change, any change, is costly. The assumption in the waterfall model is that once software has been written, changing it is more expensive than investing the time up front to come to a "complete" understanding of the problem.
Experience seems to indicate that it is very hard to come to a complete understanding of the problem and that if some precautions are taken (e.g. Unit Testing) change can become a lot cheaper. Therefore if you encounter a problem where some of the agile premises don't hold true other approaches might become feasible again. In between Waterfall and Agile there is at least Spiral development which is - sort of - what we practice.
You need to be preditive enough to deliver the goods. You need to be reactive enough to deal with the issues.
I was once stuck with six months to complete a project estimated to take a year, and based on past experience experience would take two. So I spent three months researching methodolgies. We finished on time (in three months), using the appropriate parts of a waterfall process.
A few points that made the methodoly work:
- Create an use standards, update them when needed.
- Build libraries: Do it once, do it well, fix it without breaking existing code.
- Do just enough documentation.
- Version control everything you can.
- Break things down; a method should either manage work or do work.
- Increase cohesion, decrease coupling, reuse.
- Buy or build the tools you need.
- Track your issues and progress.
Another project I was breifly involved was a six month project. I didn't get involved until a year and a half after it started. The development lead had been hired at an extreme markup as he was leaving a career with a pension plan. At the start of the project he asked the project manager, "Do you want me to do it right or be reactive?" Can you guess the answer? The week I was involved same feature was implemented on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Guess what happened Tuesday and Thursday?
The strength in Agile is its emphasis on just enough, just in time. The strength in the waterfall methodoly is that it covers all the things you need to think about. I've yet to work on a project that did or should have done all the steps. I have worked on many projects that did steps which should have been done on a corporate basis.
The title says it all. (Actually: proactive vs reactive). Why chose the reactive way and give up control unless you don't have to? Waterfall is not the only alternative, you can have any kind of development process what you refine when you like. Control is the key.
It's a spectrum btw, the waterfall on one end and the totally reactive, zero documentation methods on the other end. If you work in the consultant industry for powerful (and usually indecisive) clients, you have to resort to reactive methods. If you develop shrinkwrap software you can plan ahead and manage knowledge. Some projects also require tons of specifications and rules, where the code and fix approach just don't cut it. For me software engineering is primarily about knowledge management and design, coding comes second.
P.s. there is no such a thing as agile and fixed price. Not in the classical way they usually sell the method. See http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FixedPrice.html
If you exactly know the requirements that never chagen, if you know how long each step will take and if you know all the resources are avaliable at the time needed you can do waterfall and it will work. But in deed these kind of projects are quite rare and I think I will never be part of it.
When designing systems to be used by end users, agile often works well because the requirements are likely to be incorrect and a large part of the process is getting feedback from users in the form of a usable version.
However, when creating software that interfaces with other software often the requirements can be worked out in very clearly. In this case it is often more productive to ensure that you have a very clear and accurate specification, unit tests In this model you can also generate fairly good work estimates and there would be a great deal more cost to use the agile model.
retroactive behaviour
If you have a team of a few dozen people that have over the course of a decade, refined the waterfall strategy to the point that it works well for them, who are you to come in and say, "You're doing it wrong..."? Really, if it is working for them, why change things? Yes this is merely flipping the question around but I think it may be a valid point.
In my team we've found that with maintenance projects (which is the bulk of what we do) where we're tweaking or replacing like with like there isn't always as much need for user input beyond perhaps some UI prototypes.
In that case, particularly given that there are commercial deals involved the waterfall approach at a macro level can fit well. Even then we still like incremental / agile approaches at the implementation level.
It is worth noting that most of our clients are large lumbering organisations in love with their paperwork, so that adds even more impetus for us to at least appear traditional to them.
The documentation generated during the waterfall process allows for a lot of CYA. You can point fingers when a project goes off the rails. Very few executives are going to be OK with "oh well, I guess that project got away from us! Well, at least we found out early, no harm no foul!"
Also, design docs can automatically generate test plans, which is useful for QA.
It's pretty common when bidding for a contract that one of the iron-clad conditions is that you follow their "process" which on inspection is waterfall.
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Can Scrum and Project Management live together?
Can you take the best of both worlds or will combining these two methods?
A few things to consider:
Scrum is about empowering the team as opposed to command and control management style.
There is no manager in Scrum, there is a ScrumMaster which is a servant leader.
The ScrumMaster is responsible for the Scrum process, making sure it is used correctly and maximizes its benefits.
The ScrumMaster has to remove impediments so that the team can do his job in a productive way.
Scrum implements transparency with a minimal set of practices/roles/ceremonies and there is no real paperwork.
There is no real PMO type work in Scrum, most of PMO work is (considered as) waste.
So please, keep your PM habits away :)
And during an adoption, I'd recommend to do it as in the book (Shu), don't try to adapt it for now (Ri) (see Alistair Cockburn on Shu Ha Ri). I wouldn't even consider things like Scrumban (a modified version of Scrum using Kaban for continuous flow, no more iterations) at the start.
PS: Agile methods have all been influenced by the Lean movement (most, if not all, Agile manifesto signatories had The Machine That Changed The World in their shelves). Some could say Agile methods are a transposition of lean concepts (for new product development) to software development; others would say Agile and Lean share the same theory (see for example Jeff Sutherland's article The First Scrum: Was it Scrum or Lean?). To me, there are obvious similarities (it would be easy to map the whole Toyota Production System "House" on Agile practices) and I find Lean useful to understand how Agile works and how to implement an Agile process efficiently. So I use Lean as an as an additional toolbox. But to me, Scrum has already everything to make your development process lean, if well implemented. So there is no need to mix it. Just apply it (Shu).
Yes, Scrum and the PMO can live together. They're concerned with different things though, so the edges where the two meet are going to have to give a little. There will be some conflict at the intersection. Traditional PMBOK approaches are a poor fit to product development domains like software development, but there's quite a bit of smart statistical controls in the PMBOK, and skilled project managers who can be taught to manage flow rather than schedule are precious.
Neither Scrum nor Lean nor the Toyota organization suggest that either hierarchy or directed authority are off-limits. The definition of "Self-Organization" has been significantly stretched by software developers over the years until it has become largely indistinguishable from "Self-Determination", which was never the intention.
Toyota, for example, is a very hierarchical organization that depends very much on command and control. The difference is that it's a Learning Organization and managers at Toyota are required to have mastery of the work done in their purview, and have a duty to teach that work to workers. Team members at Toyota who envision possible improvements to their work and to the process are coached by their managers through the scientific process to prove their ideas. It helps that the process isn't shaped to fit the organization, but that the organization shifts to fit a process that is continually improved.
There is always an element of command and control in any organization. Even Scrum teams are subject to it. Even if a work team itself is perfectly flat, a Product Owner can still call the ball. Software teams have seniors and juniors, and their opinions are not perfectly equal. On Lean teams, managers are expected to be masters of the work, or have, as Toyota calls it, "towering technical competence". If management isn't skilled or is too far from the work, then they'll likely make bad decisions about the work. This is the real problem, and Self-Directed Work Teams (SDWT) are a predictable result of workers seeking to insulate themselves from poor management. SDWT is not the best answer, but it might be the limit of what an organization might achieve.
And finally, Scrum is not a project management methodology - at least not from the perspective of the rigor of the PMBOK or of Lean. But then, the application of the PMBOK to software development without significant modification to account for the nature of product development is often a fool's errand, so efforts to displace the PMBOK on software teams is understandable.
At best, Scrum is a timebox planning methodology. That's still valuable if it's the thing you need, but there's nothing inherent in software work management that suggests you need timeboxes like sprints and iterations. In fact, the upwelling of interest in iteration-less approaches like Kanban and Flow-Based management are a testament to this.
In the end, there a heck of a lot of orthodoxy built up around Scrum now that wasn't introduced by Scrum's founders and leaders, and often isn't supported by them. The same can be said about how PMOs operate. Focus on the principles of flow and learning cultures and you might be able to avoid the blind alleys and myths that gather around methodologies once they've been in the mainstream for five years or so.
Has anyone tried to incorporate different ideas (scrum, six sigma, pmp, lean?)
Essentially all of the above derive from the Japanese Quality Movement in the early 1980's.
It's all about increasing quality by reducing waste, called Muda in Japan
Lean was Toyota's implementation of the Quality Philosophies
and Six Sigma was General Electric's attempt to Americanize Lean based on corporate culture of the day.
Fast forward 20 years and the IT industry have realized that all this 'lean' thinking is a great idea for building better quality software, faster. In what has been labelled Agile.
XP (extreme programming) and SCRUM are just two different implementations of Agile techniques.
Traditional management and software management is coming up against these new ways of thinking.
You can't have it all. Either your focus is on command and hierarchy (DO AS YOUR TOLD, traditional approach) vs Collaboration and working together to reduce wastes and deliver amazing things to customers (LETS DO IT TOGETHER, new model).
If you want to go deeper on this, the best approach is to read back on the original LEAN philosophies and then see how you think they can best be applied to project management. Many of best project management ideas were already considered as part of the original Lean movement, read the book 'The Toyota Way' and look into Lean that is where you can find your own answers.
Google: the seven types of muda for a start.
Your question doesn't make sense since scrum is a project management framework but here are some things to consider:
Quality is the sole responsibility of the Team; not any PM.
Not sure what you mean by "artifacts", but the few scrum has (backlog, burndown) are maintained by the PO and Team under the guidance of the ScrumMaster.
There were no "best parts" to waterfall to want to consider continuing to use once you embrace Agile.
There is no "paperwork" in scrum; its considered waste.
People try to combine things all the time. But most of the time they get the WORST of all worlds; not the best. Most mistakes teams make in implementing scrum is to make excuses for why they can't do it the right way. Then they claim it would be better to combine in something else and just make a mess of the whole thing.
I think you are going it from the wrong side.
First you need to know what kind of team you have. Then start from that knowledge and use the appropriate methodology for your team. Rather than trying to use some methodology for your team. Do a methodology for your team. That means see what they are comfortable doing and what they think would benefit all of them.
For example: Usually when a team failed using RUP, it wasn't because they didn't follow the guidelines, but because they tried to follow all of them.
Generally I think it's better if developers don't have to do paperwork and logistics. Either they are bad at it or they would be more productive doing development.
Found this useful link today, regarding The software industry has an appaling record for project delivery. Which address your exact question.
Suggest you browse around this site to get more of an idea:
http://behaviour-driven.org/SoftwareIndustryRecordOfFailure
The above the wiki for the very excellent Dan North who proposed the idea of Behaviour Driven Design (Premise: The way we think depends on the language we use and this can be applied to software also).
Well, first of all, Scrum is a project management process, so asking if Scrum and project management can coexist is like asking if water and H2O can coexist.
Second, the PMBOK defines the project manager role as having responsibility for the success of a project. Similarly, in Scrum the Product Owner is responsible for ROI, so the responsibilities of these roles are similar even if their duties are different. Scrum eschews a command-and-control management structure, emphasizing the need for self-managed and self-empowered teams that collectively make commitments and own delivering on those commitments under the principle that the people who do the work make and own the commitment... no responsibility without authority. In Scrum, the Product Owner provides guidance to the team via the product backlog prioritization and by the defined acceptance criteria for each backlog item ("Here's what I need done and here's the functionality that must exist for me to be happy"). The Product Owner also has the final say as to whether something is done or not; if the team doesn't complete a backlog item to the Product Owner's satisfaction for any reason then the Product Owner can reject the work. I'd say that makes the Product Owner a very powerful and important role in Scrum... IMO the most important role in terms of project success.
You might want to read this blogpost on selecting the Product Owner for more information on the Product Owner role.
I think the way I read your post is that the PM does 2 things:
1) Creates artifacts necessary for the business (like compliance)
2) Manage the project
As far as #2 goes, that job becomes encompassed in the PO and SM roles. The PM continuing to do it will add confusion and hurt the process.
As for #1, that is a vital role. If the business needs this, why not add the creation of these artifacts as part of the definition of "done" and add them to the team as a member who performs this specialized task. Alternatively, you could do this outside Scrum with no one even aware that it's happening, then perhaps providing those artifacts to the PO.
Scrum is project management, just not the way project managers do it, but as Scrum does it. In short, Scrum does the compelte opposite of what people think of and are tought about project management. So, from that angle, I would say no.
On the other hand, project managers can be very efficient Product Owners.
The answer is an absolute YES.
Great question by the way.
More detailed information on this can be found here: http://www.blog.pmmetrics.com/#!SCRUM-Traditional-Project-Management-Chaos-in-IT-Industry/uiho7/577428320cf2e26a9986aa33