Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008 - (Page 53)

d06ambler_p3as 4/11/08 11:34 AM Page 53 focusing on business scenarios, or “green threads,” which involve usage of multiple systems to provide business value to stakeholders. These cross-system scenarios explore the true business processes of your stakeholders (few people sit down all day long and solely work with a single system), and thereby enable you to see the real “big picture” and hopefully avoid building yet another silo system. The good news is that the majority of organizations have adopted agile techniques Agile Scales A small number of respondents indicated that they’re succeeding with agile teams of over 200, and many others are trying Agile teams of 50 or more. People are clearly going beyond the small, colocated team approach described in many of the popular Agile writings. Within IBM, we’ve delivered products into the marketplace with agile teams of 200 people and have several agile programs of 500 or more people. My point, which I’ve iterated many times in this column, is that it is possible to scale Agile to meet the realworld needs of modern IT. Furthermore, my suspicion is that in the next few years, it will become clear that Agile scales better than traditional development approaches. It’s critical to recognize that there is more to scaling agile software development approaches than supporting large, distributed teams. For example, regulatory compliance is an important scaling factor for many teams, which complicates software development. Cultural challenges within your organization, such as supporting teams that don’t work in an agile manner or legacy policies that don’t reflect agile strategies, are also a risk at scale. Enterprise issues, such as enterprise architecture, strategic reuse, portfolio management, and IT governance become more apparent once you move beyond the pilot phase of agile adoption. Leveraging legacy assets, such as wrapping existing systems following a serviceoriented architecture (SOA) strategy or fixing data-quality problems in production data sources via database refactoring, is an important scaling factor. Factor Productivity Quality Stakeholder Satisfaction Cost Improved 82% 77% 78% 37% No Change 13% 14% 15% 40% Worsened 5% 9% 7% 23% Table 2: Effectiveness of agile teams. Adopting Agile is Very Low Risk The survey asked about the success rate of Agile project teams in different scenarios. June 2008 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 53 http://www.rallydev.com http://www.rallydev.com http://www.ddj.com

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

Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries There Must Be Contest Conversations Building a Test Harness for RTOS QT and Windows CE Software to Hardware Parallelization Performance Portable C++ Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine's Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - June 2008

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