Recently, we've seen a growing number of the agile community worrying about new topics. Guys who used to be talking about the value of standup meetings or monthly commitments are suddenly talking about corporate governance or portfolio management or product mix selection or enterprise scalability. Why? Because the agile development movement has won the debate - the battle is over. This past year, the analyst groups like Meta, Gartner and co have been around the C level executives asking them "what's your strategy for going agile?" Yep, the jury is in and the verdict is that agile development delivers a better return for the stockholder. If you want to be a thought leader and top dollar consultant in this space now, you need a new trick. The old trick is a commodity already.
Regular readers of this site will know that they've been ahead of this curve for at least a couple of years. There is some pretty detailed material on product mix selection and portfolio management either in my book or in the papers that I've presented over the past couple of years. I'm adding to that with some solid corporate governance material in the new MSF which coupled to a tool like Team System delivers trustworthy transparency. I'm going to be saying a lot more about trustworthy transparency this coming fall. Look out for my keynote at the EuroSUN event in Copenhagen this November.
It's actually pretty simple to explain why I've been ahead of the curve on this new trend - we were using transparent reporting tools with FDD in 1998. We had end-to-end traceability from requirements to tests via an intranet application. We had automated reporting and charting. We had what are now known as information radiators. In fact, the great big chart, was pasted outside the wall of the CIO's office once a week. He had to walk past it to get to his door. He had complete transparency into all 2000 or so features. He could see how many were started, how many were finished, how many were blocked or late and of those in progress at what stage they had reached. He could see the names of the team members responsible for different sections. If the wall chart piqued his interest, then he could go pull up his home page and start clicking. He could keep clicking and see issues, see designs, object models, java doc, source code and test results. In fact everyone at the bank could technically have done the same - including the Chairman. With FDD, we were doing good governance with trustworthy transparency 7 years ago. Enterprise level objectivity in agile methods isn't new.
The agile manifesto has had its catalytic affect. Agile is a flywheel building momentum and changing the industry - changing the way people think about delivering value from software engineering activities. Improving quality through defect reduction techniques like pair programming and test first development is all very well but to really deliver bottom line changing results, we must now look to solve harder problems. Problems that involve coordination across organizations. For that reason, the race is now on to deliver an agile enterprise with good governance, agile portfolio management and product mix selection. Expect to be hearing a lot more about trustworthy transparency.
