Posted on December 11th, 2009 by Santiago Ceria
A few days ago I was talking to a colleague and he told me “I’ve convinced my boss to start using Scrum”. “Great!”, I replied. But then he started to describe his situation and the problems he is having. And the main problem was that they still didn’t have a product backlog. And his question was “What do I do before I’m ready to do my first sprint?”. This is not exactly the issue I would like to discuss, but it reminded me of another problem I see in agile methods, and it’s the idea that “all sprints are equal”.
Let’s analyze some differences between two iterative and incremental processes: Scrum and UP (or RUP). One significant difference is that UP has the notion of Iteration Phase, or Iteration Type. This means that not all iterations are equal. And this makes a lot of sense to me. Not all iterations are equal because when you start a software project there are many unknowns and things you have to analyze and think about. And when you are about to deploy a system to a production environment or release it to customers there are many other things you need to do that are different from what you do during construction. This doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens often. And then you start seeing agile teams that do “Stabilization Sprints”, or “Release Sprints”. I’m sure those are forbidden words for many agilists, but at least I was relieved to read a post by Mike Cohn about release sprints where he describes a Bank that manages a 13 million LOC core system that needs them. Believe me, they are not alone.
I think Agile methods should put more focus in these issues, which are very relevant in many projects. And give practical and specific advice on how to do all this while being agile. In other words, I don’t think minimizing the potential differences in sprints is a good idea.
So, in this case, the problem I see in Agile methods is not related to what they say, it’s to what they don’t say.
Tags: Agile Methods, Release Sprints, Scrum
Cathegory: Uncategorized | 2 comments »
Posted on November 25th, 2009 by HAT
17th of November was a very cool day, i could enjoy the Google DevFest 2009 in Argentina and i will share you some exiting thinks from this event.
Some news about Google Apps
Google is working in a lot of new stuff, one of them is the improvement of the GEO API. The 3th version of Javascript API for Google Maps is growing up faster and its focused on speed browsing and will bring us some new cool feautres.
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Tags: Android, GeoAPI, Google, Social, Web
Cathegory: Events, Technology | No comments yet »
Posted on November 22nd, 2009 by Santiago Ceria
Another problem I see in some Agile Methods is a lack of flexibility about the rules they propose. I see that as some kind of contradiction: for example, Scrum is empirical only for things that it does not define beforehand.
“Don’t change Scrum” is something that Ken Schwaber wrote in his book Scrum and the Enterprise. Here’s his rationale for this: “Scrum isn’t a process that you can modify to fit your enterprise. Instead, it exposes every dysfunction in your enterprise while you build products… Whenever people change Scrum, it’s because they’ve run into a problem, dysfunction, or conflict that they do not want to face and fix. Instead, they change Scrum so that the problem remains invisible and remains deadly to the enterprise. If you allow this to happen, you will have lost Scrum’s primary benefit”.
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Tags: Agile Methods, Methodology
Cathegory: Methodology | 1 comment »
Posted on November 10th, 2009 by Santiago Ceria
First of all, I admit I do not consider myself an expert in Agile Methods. Yes… I’m a Certified Scrum Master and I’ve been involved in several agile projects. But let’s say I don’t know enough and have enough experience to consider myself an expert. Even with this, I will dare say which are the issues that I don’t see addressed correctly in these methods, or at least in the typical “Scrum + XP” combination that used in most cases in Industry. The risk here is that someone will quickly reply with a link to explain how these issues can be solved. Oh well… I’ll take that risk.
I also want to say in advance that in general I have a positive view on Agile methods. I think they are an interesting packaging of useful practices and that they have made a huge contribution to development practice in general. I also value some new practices like TDD and Continuous Integration that have provided smart answers to increasing challenges of software development.
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Tags: Agile Methods, software engineering
Cathegory: Methodology | 3 comments »
Posted on October 29th, 2009 by HAT
People have been talking about web semantic and web 3.0 and we need to understand that they are two very different thinks. The term of the semantic web is coined by Tim Berners-Lee and there is no full consensus about what Web 3.0 means.
We can say that Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform. At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies.
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Tags: Semantic Web, Web 3.0
Cathegory: General, Technology, Web | 1 comment »