Dr. Dobb's Journal - October 2007 - (Page 61)

The Discipline of Active Stakeholder Involvement Stakeholders—including business stakeholders, operations and support staff, and other enterprise IT professionals—are actively involved on Agile projects. Ideally, stakeholders are involved every single day throughout the life of your project, actively participating in modeling and testing efforts and sometimes even in development (yes, stakeholders can learn to prototype and even to write production code). This level of involvement enables them to see the inner workings of your software development efforts, motivating developers to act in a more professional and disciplined manner. It also motivates developers to focus on the actual priorities of their stakeholders and not their own personal priorities. Effective active stakeholder involvement requires a clear definition of rights and responsibilities within the team. Stakeholders are commonly responsible for providing information and making decisions in a timely manner, and for prioritizing requirements. Developers must provide accurate estimates in a timely manner, commit to and honor those estimates, and explain the technical trade-offs associated with various decisions. Stakeholders and developers must respect the decisions made by others on the team, even when they disagree For example, a developer might not like how the requirements are prioritized but must still work on them in that order, and a stakeholder may not like the estimate given by a developer for a specific work item but must still respect it. As you can imag- ine, following these philosophies requires discipline at all times by everyone involved. It is interesting to observe that by providing working software every iteration and supporting active stakeholder participation, stakeholders are given insight into the actual status of a software development project. This enables business stakeholders to effectively govern IT, the topic of next month’s column. Discipline at Scale There are several “Agile at Scale” practices that require a level of discipline rarely seen How to Tell the Agilists from the Code-and-Fixers Sadly, there is no official definition for “Agile Software Development” against which you can determine whether a team is agile. However, I’ve found true Agile teams: • Take a test-driven approach to development. • Work very closely with their stakeholders on a daily basis, and the stakeholders have active roles on the team. • Produce working software on a regular basis and can show a clear track record of doing so throughout the project. • Work in an open, collaborative, and self-organizing manner. —SWA October 2007 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 61 http://www.wibu.com http://www.wibu.com http://www.imagix.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - October 2007

Cover Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook AI: It’s OK Again! Conversations Visual Cryptography and Bit-Plane Complexity Segmentation Inside the Windows Vista Disk Encryption Algorithm Memory-Aware Components Software and the Core Description Process Logging In C++ Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - October 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.