Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008 - (Page 67)

building or city), or dispersed to various locations around the world? Your communication strategy will vary; in particular, the more dispersed your team, the greater the need for coordination and interim documentation. 2. Regulatory compliance. Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) statutes will increase the documentation and process burden on your projects. 3. Entrenched policies, people, and processes. The organization in which your agile team works may be very agile, it may be very traditional, or somewhere in between. Development teams will need to be flexible in the way that they work with enterprise support teams, and similarly these support teams will need to vary their strategy depending on the working styles of the various teams that they support. 4. Legacy assets. Does your system have to integrate with existing assets such as legacy databases, shared services, or legacy systems? Not only will your technical strategy change to reuse these assets, you may discover that you need to refactor them to bring their quality in line with what your team is creating. 5. Organizational distribution. Do you have people on your team from different work groups, divisions, countries, or even companies? This will impact the way that you organize your team, how you organize the work, and how you share information. 6. Degree of governance. If you have one or more IT projects underway, then you have a development governance program in place. How formal is it? Does it enable or hinder agile work practices? Does it add additional overhead or does it help to streamline your work? 7. Team size. The way that you organize, manage, and support a team of 5 people is very different than the way you do so for a team of 50 or 500. 8. System complexity. The more complex the system, the greater the need for a viable architectural strategy, although that doesn’t necessarily imply the need for onerous documentation. Many agile teams adopt the Rational Unified Process (RUP)’s strategy of envisioning the architecture early in the lifecycle and then immediately proving that it works via the creation of an end-toend, working skeleton of the system. The values contained in the Agile Alliance’s Agile Manifesto (www.agilemanifesto.org) implicitly promote the concept that agile is relative, yet it seems to me that we often forget this in practice. More and more we’re applying agile approaches at scale and we’re finding that we need to be flexible in our approach. We’re also finding that at scale, we need to move towards the right-hand side of the agile values more than some agile zealots would prefer. The agile strategies that worked for small, colocated teams developing straightforward systems won’t work very well for large, dispersed teams working in regulatory environments on very complex software. Different situations require different strategies, and the best advice that I can give is to embrace change. DDJ Scott is a DDJ Senior Contributing Editor and author of numerous IT books. He can be contacted at www.ambysoft.com/ scottAmbler.html. March 2008 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 67 http://www.agilemanifesto.org http://www.ambysoft.com/scottAmbler.html http://www.ambysoft.com/scottAmbler.html http://www.programmingresearch.com http://www.programmingresearch.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008 Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Social Networks and Software Development Conversations Detecting Bugs in Safety-Critical Code Change Code Without Fear Continuous Integration and Performance Testing Wt: A Web Toolkit Automating Release Notifications The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - March 2008

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