Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Contextualizing Agile Software Development (paper review)

Contextualizing Agile Software Development (paper review):
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smr.572/full

Philippe Kruchten has written a very interesting article about adopting Agile methods in the context of companies that do not have the "ideal" grounds for it.

Kruchten presents a set of factors to consider when defining the context of the company and a set of "thresholds" for each of these factors. Nice....

I would like to quote a paragraph in the introduction which I really liked:
"An analogy [MS: to the definition of Agile] could be the definition of a road. Would you define a road as something made of crushed rocks and tar, or define it as a surface that is black rather than white, flat rather than undulated, and with painted lines rather than monochrome? Or would you rather define a road as a component of a transportation system, allowing people and goods to be moved on the ground surface from point A to point B? And then let the properties or components of the road be derived from this functional definition, allowing some novel approaches in road design, rather than defining it narrowly using a common recipe."

Think about it for a second - if we defined roads like we define Agile - would we be able to get anywhere? I think that this sums up a lot...

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