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

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

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

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

We've had some problems with the somewhat loose wording that sneaked in to the MSF Glossary in the process guidance. The in-the-box wording has conjured up a lot of use case type imagery and confused a lot of people. We'll be correcting the definition in the next release of the guidance. In the meantime, here is the new definition.

scenario

A type of work item, describing a specific usage of the envisaged software system by a particular persona. Scenarios should be goal directed. As a persona attempts to reach a goal, the scenario records the specific steps taken in attempting to reach that goal.

This new definition is intended to underline the origins of personas and usage scenarios from the human computer interaction and user experience design community. MSF is intended as a methodology that encourages good user experience and interaction design and is founded on requirements techniques from the user experience community. Specifically, personas originate from Alan Cooper and Kim Goodwin and Usage Scenarios from the HCI department at Virginia Tech. [As an interesting footnote: Alan Cooper was the creator of Visual Basic and by incorporating some of his work on user experience and interaction we are re-connecting with an old friend.] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF

Where were you five years ago today?

I had a breakfast meeting with Steven Huber from the User Experience team at Sprintpcs.com. He arrived a little late and reported to me that he'd heard on the radio that a small plane had crashed in to the World Trade Center building in New York. I remember we talked about a similar incident that had happened many years earlier to the Empire State Building then we got on with business.

A couple of hours later, I was in my office on the Kansas City side of State Line Road, standing on the balcony of the 2nd floor overlooking the lobby. The security guard had dragged a TV set to a location where a crowd could gather to watch the first tower burning and hear the emerging news. Clearly that early radio report had been misinformed. I arrived back just in time to see the second tower hit. Quite simply a World changing event was unfolding in front of me. I tried to call my wife to tell her to put on the TV. She didn't believe what I told her. She had photos of her standing in the restaurant at the top of World Trade Center. She couldn't believe it was gone.

Later that day all the Sprint staff got an email from top management asking us not to use our cell phones in order to free bandwidth for emergency services. This wasn't actually an issue in Kansas City. Next day the doors to the office buildings were locked. This heightened security lasted for months. You had to wave your badge at the security guard who would come and open the door.

My boss was stranded in Alaska with a bunch of my colleagues who were attending a WAP Forum meeting in Anchorage. Some other colleagues were in Seattle at a conference. They rented a mini-van and drove it back to KC. The team in Anchorage rented a private jet after the ban on small planes was lifted several days later.

As a kid who grew up in Britain in the Cold War, during the 1970's when the BBC carried public information video showing how to build a nuclear bomb shelter under the kitchen table and gave advice on what kind of tinned food to store for the aftermath of disaster, I truly thought my children would grow up in a kinder world where such security concerns were history. Anyone, like me, who had to make business travel in the weeks and months after September 11th - we launched the Sprint PCS Developers Network and our Sprint PCS Vision (and WAM) initiative one month later in Las Vegas - was quickly to realize that our children will grow up in a World with its own set of challenges. A four hour queue to get out of Las Vegas was evidence enough of that. The line was backed up out in to the parking lot in 100 degree heat. Staff from Southwest Airlines were walking the line giving out bottles of water. At least back then we could still carry bottled water on to the aircraft.

For me personally, the most moving thing happened a couple of weeks later. I got an email from Jeff De Luca. He was simply checking up on all his US resident friends to make sure none of them had been involved.

In my tradition of bringing you old news in an untimely fashion, here are a few shots of my trip to Taipei. I was there from August 12th to 17th and on the 16th I was part of a Software Engineering day event organized by the local Microsoft office. The event at the Grand Hyatt in Taipei attracted 450 visitors. I gave the keynote speech and then appeared on a panel with some local experts to talk about CMMI, agile and software engineering in general. You can read all about it in this press release (PDF, traditional Chinese).

This is me opening the proceeding in the morning with the keynote speech.

And later on the panel session with Nien Chen (NC) Liu and Peter Hu from Microsoft to my left and the panel of local experts to my right: Professor Cheng, Professor Chou and Mr. Hu (the first CMMI Lead Appraiser in Taiwan.)

A few empty seats in the front row but otherwise it was a full house at the Grand Hyatt.

As you can see better from this angle.

We got quite a few questions from the floor.

Here I am giving a press interview earlier in the week. Everything involved eating. I put on 5 lbs over the 3 week trip to Asia. So lots of biking to work for me to take it all off again, now that I'm back in Seattle. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Taipei, MSF, Microsoft, Software+Engineering

Some people have been asking me whether or not I'll be fulfilling my scheduled speaking engagements following the news of my departure from Microsoft.

The simple answer is that I will be fulfilling all my obligations. There are only three, namely, the PNSQC in Portland Oregon in October, Project World in Orlando in November and OOP in Munich in January. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, PNSQC, Project+World, OOP

So after yesterday's old news, here is some new news.

I am leaving Microsoft and my job as the architect for the MSF methodology. I am taking up a new position as the Senior Director for Software Engineering at Corbis. The company is owned by Bill Gates. So I might be changing employers but my ultimate boss remains the same.

In any career move, like this one, the decision is always complicated. People might want to jump to conclusions. There have been lots of people leaving Microsoft recently. However, whatever people may conclude, I loved working for Microsoft and I thought I had a really cool job. Working on MSF as part of Patterns and Practices and Visual Studio Team Architect was a great place to be. The team is changing the way we engineer software and manage software projects. It's been a privilege to work with each and every one of them and I wish them all well. I have made many friends at Microsoft.

However, when I took the job I told Sam Guckenheimer that I could only do it for two years. After that I needed to get back to managing a team and leading people doing real work. If I stayed too long in the MSF ivory tower I'd lose my credibility to talk about management and agility and software engineering. So when the chance came up to go to Corbis and get back to leading a team I jumped at it.

Just as I have sad feelings about leaving Microsoft and an unfinished job with MSF, I am equally excited about the opportunities and challenges at Corbis. So stay tuned to Agile Management blog. I'm not going away. Instead I'm going to show how to scale agile and achieve enterprise-wide results.

[Oh and I won't mind the easier commute from Ballard to downtown Seattle - giving me back about 60 minutes of every day.] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF, Microsoft

I've been a bit slow to get this news out. Over the summer we reorganized the MSF team in to the Patterns and Practices team and moved our offices to building 5 on the Redmond campus. We now share the beautiful new collaboration space that the PnP created. The plans for this were laid when Ward Cunningham and Jim Newkirk were on the team.

Before I share some photos of the new space, I want to be clear that MSF is still part of Visual Studio Team System. What actually happened was PnP was merged in to the VSTS team. After that was completed it made natural sense to move MSF in to the PnP team. I joked that we were putting all the non-revenue generating things together in one bucket but actually what we did is put all the practices and guidance and methodology things together in one team in the one collaborative space.

As part of the reorganization, Steve Elston takes over as the Group Manager for MSF and Sanjeev Garg is our new Program Manager. There is a slightly modified role for Randy Miller who becomes the Product Planner for MSF. Meanwhile, my title was changed to Process Architect.

I'm also incredibly excited to announce that Alan Wills has joined the team as Software Architect. Alan has a strong background in methodology with his work on Catalysis with Desmond D'Sousa in the 1990's. Adding Alan adds some significant intellectual horsepower to our team.

Mean while we have collocated the team in one of the flexible collaboration work spaces in building 5. Finally, the MSF team gets to be agile. This will greatly enhance our productivity and quality and I'm very excited about our next release of MSF - which is being targeted to coincide with the launch of the Database Professional version of VSTS (sorry, I won't talk about dates ;-) ).

Here are a few pictures of the new flexible work space in building 5. It's a PnP experiment to show how Microsoft can build a work environment for agility and agile practices.

This is the entrance to the wing of building 5 where the new space has been built.

This open collaborative space is mostly reserved as "hot" or "jump" stations for contractors and visiting staff.

This is my new office. The offices are smaller than traditional Microsoft personal offices. However, they have sliding doors to save space. They also have glass walls and doors to let light through in to the central collaborative working spaces.

Notice in this second one, how the walls can move.

And here is one of those. The space can actually be configured in to different sized rooms. This is one of the larger ones.

And here is another one. Note the different layout in the room.

The tables are designed to take two flat panel monitors using these flexible brackets.

Many of the walls are glass to allow light to penetrate deep in to the building. Some of these are opaque and double as whiteboards.

There are also some small rooms for private meetings, conference calls and brainstorming sessions.

We also have a social area with a big screen - ideal for watching World Cup Soccer games.

The collaboration spaces have sliding glass doors again to save space and allow light in to the room. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSFT, Microsoft, Patterns+Practices, MSF