Sunday, September 17, 2006

Some Remarkable Results from V1 Survey

Our friends at VersionOne have been kind enough to share their market research survey results with the community. Robert Holler started this online survey in June and it ran until August with over 700 people responding*.

I personally think there are two remarkable results in this survey. (1) The average length of time a company had been using agile was only 1.9 years, (2) when asked who instigated agile in your organization, 28% responded that it was a VP or Director, and when you add in the numbers for Project Manager and CEO the total adds up to 50%. We often assume that agile is a grass roots movement instigated by developers. It would appear that as agile has crossed the chasm in to mainstream adoption, the people driving adoption have changed. The message is clear, if you are in the business of selling tools, services, consulting or training to the agile community then you need to be targeting managers.

Additionally, these results are very encouraging for the future of the Agile Project Leadership Network that I helped to start. The APLN should grow rapidly and remain healthy as there is clearly a strong pool of pro-agile managers emerging. If you are one of those managers, reading this and looking for advice on managing agile projects, then I’d recommend that you join the APLN and get involved in a local chapter. If you don’t have one then form one.

*Correction. Thanks to Paul Culling at VersionOne. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, VersionOne, Robert+Holler

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Agile - Losing Sight of the Goal?

I’ve seen a lot of discussion recently about what truly represents an agile method or not. It’s being discussed in agile community discussion lists and Yahoo! groups, executives in commercially companies are discussing it, some authors like Boehm & Turner, Highsmith, Larman and others have tried to classify or identify agile methods, and most recently I’ve heard that analyst research firms are getting in on the act.

I’m increasingly seeing Ken Schwaber’s criteria use to classify what represents an agile method used as the standard measure. As a reminder, Ken said, an agile process is

• iterative
• incremental
• self-organizing
• and emergent
• and if it is not all 4 of these then it is merely a lightweight defined process

Frankly, I think the whole debate about which processes are agile or not is somewhat pointless and particularly if this is the criteria used to determine the result. Why am I disillusioned with this? Because some of us in the agile community have lost sight of the goal. Agile for agile’s own sake is pointless. The agile movement ought to be about delivering value to the wider community. So how about my criteria for whether a process represents the spirit of the agile community?...

A process is agile if it

• enables companies to easily respond to change
• delivers working code to market faster (than previously or with other methods)
• delivers high quality working code
• improves productivity
• improves customer satisfaction
• and provides an environment for a well motivated team with high job satisfaction

Before we become a community of inward focused homogenous navel gazers, let’s remember the goal! Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson

Friday, September 15, 2006

What Scenarios in MSF are not

There continues to be some confusion over the definition and meaning of scenario in MSF. We know this is causing some pain for our customers. It’s been pointed out to me that Scott Ambler has a definition of usage scenario in his agile modeling body of knowledge. This is fueling the confusion.

Last Tuesday I offered our new definitive definition of scenario in MSF. Scenario in MSF is indeed short for usage scenario but those usage scenarios have nothing to do with legacy from OOSE and the requirements and analysis technique called use cases. There are no use cases in MSF. MSF does not describe procedures of interaction in the system architecture. And there are no abstract analysis concepts such as actors and the use cases they perform. MSF uses very specific, detailed definitions called personas and scenarios. I hope this helps to clear up any confusion. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Report Author for MSF Team

Do you know how to author reports for Team Foundation Server? Are you interested in a temporary position with the MSF team in Redmond that might grow in to something more permanent? Would you like to be responsible for developing the next generation of reports for MSF? If so then drop me an email and I’ll forward it on to Steve Elston the Group Manager for MSF. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF, TFS, Team+Foundation+Server, Visual+Studio, Microsoft

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Discount for Project World in Orlando this November

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m presenting at this year’s Project World Conference in Orlando in November. As a reader of Agile Management Blog, the organizers are offering you a discount on the attendance fee. Use priority code SPKRM1820DA to insure you get your discount.

Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Project+World