Saturday, December 13, 2008

A Couple of Other Areas of Innovation

In my post The Case for An Agile Fringe I mentioned two current fringe areas that I thought were interesting: Real Options; and Agile+CMMI. I don’t want folks to think this list is exhaustive. Two more areas that I see current interest and activity building are agile for embedded systems, and agile contracts.

I’ve been asked by several people in recent months who work for companies that make physical products that contain significant portions of software, about how agile practices can be applied in their field. Some folks are responding to this demand. I would expect some of that to emerge in 2009 in publications and presentations. So I’m predicting the emergence of an agile for embedded systems movement next year.

I’m also seeing a lot of work on developing agile working relationships between client IT and technology companies and outsource development vendors. Until now the agile contracts literature has been fairly thin and based mainly on thought experiments. I’m actively seeing consulting and outsource firms offering agile ways of working and interacting to their clients, for example, Valtech have an offering they call Software on Demand. I am also seeing significant users of outsource/offshore development demanding more agility from their suppliers and writing contracts requiring an agile way of working and interacting. In the language of the Software Engineering Institute, we are now seeing agile penetrate into the field of Supplier Agreement Management and Software Acquisition. I fully expect case studies and more literature to appear in this field in 2009.

What else are you working on that might be considered fringe? Technorati tag: Agile+2009, Agile+Fringe, David+Anderson, SEI, Carnegie+Mellon, CMMI, embedded+systems, software+engineering

Monday, December 01, 2008

Plans for Brazil and Argentina Changed

I’ve removed my post about Zen of Agile Management classes in Brazil and Argentina in 2009. The Argentina class is postponed until the 2nd quarter - probably June. The Brazil class is postponed and it’s unknown when it will take place. I’ll post a new note on this when I have more details - probably in early 2009. Meanwhile, if you are in Brazil or Argentina and are interest in taking my class on Agile Management or classes on Kanban or Agile+CMMI please get in touch.

Technorati tag: Agile, CMMI, Management, Leadership, Heptagon, Liveware

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Tech Program for SEPG North America 2009 Announced

I’ll be giving three sessions at SEPG North America in San Jose in March. One on agile metrics for quantitative management (i.e. model level 4) another the other on building a culture for high maturity (model levels 4 & 5) with kanban and teaming up with Mike Konrad and the gang to talk about the new Technical Note, CMMI and Agile: Why not embrace both! The program also includes a key note from Alistair Cockburn and a considerable amount of Agile+CMMI material from folks like Nelson Perez, Corey Ladas, Christian Hertneck, Hillel Glazer, Jeff Dalton. This is the year of Agile and CMMI and the two camps coming together. I would really like to see a significant turn out of agile folks at the SEPG in 2009. Open your mind to the idea that organizational maturity matters and that the SEI has a contribution to make that can help us all succeed. Take a look at the program for the event. Hope to see some of you there.

Technorati tag: Agile, CMMI, SEPG, SEI, Carnegie+Mellon, Software+Engineering+Institute

CMMI and Agile paper causing a stir

The new Technical Note from the SEI which I co-authored has been causing a stir. My friend Adail Retamal has translated some of the somehwat cynical commentary from Brazilian agile and XP discussion lists. I’m excited to see so much debate on this and read these wonderfully creative comments…

Well, after some have found the Agile CMMI idea nice (this is a sign of the end times) , I can only propose an AgileWaterfall 2009 conference.

Some of the themes could be:
- Agility and Bureaucracy: get the best of both
- Waterfall made Agile: just burn out the documentation
- Agility with Control: Henry Ford has done it a century ago!
- XMMI (eXtreme CMMI): the 12 practices revisited under CMMI
- The CMMA Model: How Agile are You?

See how the first XCMMI practice would look like:

Pair Everything: Why only pair programming? Let’s expand this agile
practice: Pair Analysis, Pair Design, Pair Project Monitoring and
Control, Pair Requirements Management, Pair Organization Process
Definition, Pair Quantitative Project Management, Pair Decision
Analysis and Resolution, etc. As you can see, with XCMMI, we have a
lot more pairs than with the regular XP.

If you send me enough good ideas, we’ll even build a site like the waterfall’2006.

——————————————————-

hehehe “Pair Decision Analysis and Resolution”

Some other ideas:
- Taskboard CMMI: all your documents printed and exposed on a white board visible to everyone.
- Daily meetings: 15 minutes every day… for every process.
- Chart burndown. Let’s show all the metrics in a bunch of burndowns!

And so on :D

——————————————————-

Extreme Waterfall:

Just 4 Values, 12 Practices, 5 Years and 12 million dollars!

Values (aka, The Cobra Kai system):

Fear - code is dangerous, code is your enemy. Run away or hide from
code if you can. If you can’t, pray. Pray VERY hard.

Silence - it is golden, gold means money and money is good. If you
can’t say anything good about the system, shut up. We don’t need your
negativism!

Aim - measure a thousand times and cut once. After all, systems are
very much like diamonds!

Practices

Stand-Up Coding: coding 15 minutes a day keeps tendinitis away.
Feudal CodeBase - Be the Lord of Thy Land, keep invaders at bay,
punish trespassers.
Weekly Iterations - based on Pluto’s calendar.
40-Hour Weekend - times flies with pizza and cola!
Lego Design - 5 generic components is all you need to build any
system. Take a look at Assembly. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, agile+management, CMMI

CMMI and Agile: Why not embrace both!?

The SEI has released a Technical Note that I co-authored with Mike Konrad, Hillel Glazer, Jeff Dalton, and Sandy Shrum. This paper was written almost a year ago and went through a lot of revision and review. We published a public draft at the SEPG conference in March 2008 and held a panel session with all the authors to discuss the content. The paper is finally complete and published. It’s a 48 page document. This is no lightweight look at Agile and CMMI. It’s a very in-depth analysis that looks at why people perceived incompatibilities and why the two communities were not mixing or understanding each other’s point of view. I suspect it will be for some time to come, the definitive statement on Agile + CMMI.

Here are the official announcements…

Announcement 1<?xml:namespace prefix = o /?>

Think that Agile and CMMI are incompatible? You may be wrong according to the authors of a newly released report published by the Software Engineering Institute. The report CMMI and Agile: Why Not Embrace Both! explains why each of these two improvement approaches have been misunderstood by users of the other approach and describes how CMMI and Agile can be used together in ways that benefit from the advantages of both. Take a look at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/08.reports/08tn003.html for a copy of the report.

 

Announcement 2

CMMI® and Agile: Why Not Embrace Both!

Agile development methods and CMMI (Capability Maturity Model® Integration) best practices are often perceived to be at odds with each other. This report clarifies why the discord need not exist and proposes that CMMI and Agile champions work toward deriving benefit from using both and exploit synergies that have the potential to dramatically improve business performance. Get a copy of this groundbreaking report at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/08.reports/08tn003.html.

Technorati tag: SEI, Software+Engineering+Institute, Carnegie+Mellon, David+Anderson, Software+Engineering, CMMI, Agile