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THE DORSET HOUSE QUARTERLY VOL. XIV NO. 1 SUMMER 2004 DORSET HOUSE PUBLISHING 353 WEST 12TH STREET NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014 USA Greetings DHQ As we approach our 20th anniversary in December, we take pride in what’s shaping up to be our most prolific year DHQ EXCERPT ever. As we describe below and on page 6, we’ve added three books to our forthcoming titles list. Be sure to subscribe to e-DHQ for updates as we release these titles in Agility and Largeness the coming months—just e-mail [email protected]. DeMarco and Lister by Jutta Eckstein Waltz Away with a Adapted from Chapter 1 of Jolt Award for Best Book Agile Software Development in the Large: In a ceremony at the SD West conference in Santa Clara, California, Tom DeMarco Diving Into the Deep and Timothy Lister’s Waltzing with Bears: ISBN: 0-932633-57-9 ©2004 Managing Risk on Software Projects was 248 pages softcover $39.95 postpaid awarded the Jolt Product Excellence Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister cele- Award for best general-interest book. brate their Jolt Award for best book. gile processes promise to react flexibly to continuously The Jolt Awards are presented every year to products changing requirements. That is why agile processes are that have boosted the productivity of software profes- Acurrently treated as a panacea for successful software sionals. Tim Lister was present to receive the award, a can development. However, agile processes are almost always of Jolt cola ensconced in a lucite cube. Out of just six final- recommended for small projects and small teams only—bad ists for the award, another Dorset news for those large teams that have to deal with speedy House release was honored: Five Core requirements changes. Metrics: The Intelligence Behind Successful Software engineers tend to question the feasibility of agile soft- Software Management, by Lawrence H. ware development in the large, not only because most agile Putnam and Ware Myers. To celebrate processes claim to work mainly for small teams, but also because these honors and to jolt as many readers most of the projects that fail are large. The reason most (large) proj- as possible, we are offering a 20% ects fail is a lack of communication: among teammates, between discount off Waltzing with Bears and Five team and manager, between team and customer, and so on. Core Metrics when you order before August 31, 2004. Call (800)-342-6657 and mention “JOLT 20” or order online The Importance of Communication at www.dorsethouse.com/jolt/. See page 3 for an excerpt from Waltzing with Bears. Communication is one of the focal points of agile processes. But can effective communication ever be established successfully for Large Teams Go Agile, Too, with New Book large teams? The popular opinion is that it can’t, leading to the HOT OFF THE PRESSES: Agile Software Development in the Large: Diving idea that if you have a hundred people on a development team Into the Deep, by Jutta Eckstein, and get rid of all but the top twenty or (preferably) fewer, the explores ways to adapt agile chances for project success will rise significantly. methods for use on large projects. However, you can’t generally avoid large projects. Some- A board member of the Agile times, you will face constraints that force you to run a large Alliance (www.agilealliance.org) project with a large team. For instance, some projects have such and an early supporter of the Agile At XP2004, Jutta Eckstein celebrates her brand- a large scope that it is not possible to realize it with a small team Manifesto, Jutta (pronounced U-tah) new book with Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns. in the defined time frame. shows large teams how to scale-up If you want to take advantage of agile the processes and value system of INSIDE DHQ processes, several questions arise: Are agile lightweight, agile methods, which Greetings. 1 processes able to scale? That is, Can they be have generally been considered Agile Excerpt . 1 amplified in order to support large projects? limited to small teams. Jutta Waltzing Excerpt . 3 And, moreover, are they able to support presented the first printed copies of Drabick Interview . 4 ECSAM Excerpt . 5 large projects? And what kind of problems her book while serving as the Forthcoming Books . 6 occur when an enterprise decides to use an program chair at XP2004, held in Recent Reviews . 6 agile process for a large, perhaps even Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, Order Form . 7 June 6–10. See this page for an mission-critical, project? My book tries to Is this your first DHQ? answer these and many questions relating excerpt from Jutta’s book and page 7 Send your postal address for a free for ordering information. subscription, but also send your e-mail to agile software development. Here, address for e-DHQ, our monthly e-mail newsletter. Since we only mail though, I discuss some aspects of what I A DHQ Debut for Three Titles DHQ to subsets of our list, e-DHQ is the most reliable way to get DHQ‘s mean by large projects. Three titles make their first appear- news and features. We maintain our ance in this publication: Endgame, by list in-house, and we do not rent, sell, or share information about our The Dimensions of Largeness Robert Galen • Just Enough Require- customers with any third-parties. Call 1-800-342-6657 or (212) 620- ments Management, by Alan Davis • 4053, fax (212) 727-1044, e-mail Object-Oriented Computation in C++ [email protected], or visit us at In my experience, I have found that a project can be considered www.dorsethouse.com/comments.html. large in many dimensions. For example, the money, scope, and Java, by Conrad Weisert. You’ll Editor: David McClintock save 20% when you reserve by credit Editorial Assts.: Nuno Andrade amount of people, and risks involved can be large. These and Vincent Au card prior to publication. See page 6. Copyright © 2004 by different “dimensions” of largeness are mostly interrelated. Dorset House Publishing Co., Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (continued on page 2) 2 THE DORSET HOUSE QUARTERLY VOL. XIV NO. 1 SUMMER 2004 1-800-342-6657 NOW IN STOCK DHQ Excerpt (continued from page 1) Some dimensions—scope and • 100 people or more: Even if you people—exist as a first-order conse- have an open-plan office available, quence of the requirements and teams of this size will not fit in a constraints. Others are derived from single room. Therefore, across the these first-order dimensions. entire team, you have to strategi- You can definitely run a large- cally foster the kind of “natural” scope project with a small team. But communication that would take large-scope projects are almost always place inside a single room. developed by a large team—espe- • 1,000 people or more: Chances are cially in large companies. high that this team will not only be Typically, if a project is large in distributed over several rooms, but terms of people, all its other dimen- also over several buildings, perhaps sions are probably just as large. For over several locations. Conse- Agile Software Development example, you will hardly ever find a quently, the people on the team are in the Large: large team working on a project with unlikely to know all their team- Diving Into the Deep a narrow scope, a schedule of only mates. three months, or a budget of only a by Jutta Eckstein few hundred thousand dollars. The This example shows not only that ISBN: 0-932633-57-9 ©2004 large is relative, but also that scaling 248 pages softcover $39.95 postpaid project itself might not carry any extraordinary risk, but scaling all the can lead to different consequences. gile or “lightweight” processes have project’s dimensions implies a risk of Detecting the Agile Process for Scaling Arevolutionized the software develop- its own. For instance, if a lot of ment industry. They’re faster and more money is involved, there is a high risk A large team is typically split into efficient than traditional software develop- that a lot of money will be lost. Or, if the time frame is extremely large, the many smaller teams. Because a lot ment processes. They enable developers risk that the project will never be has been written elsewhere about to embrace requirement changes during finished at all increases. agile processes in small teams, I do the project, deliver working software in not focus on the processes these frequent iterations, and focus on the The Impact of Largeness subteams are using. Instead, I concen- human factor in software development. trate on the process that brings them nfortunately, most agile processes are Of course, large is not a well-defined all together and enables them— Udesigned for small or mid-sized soft- magnitude, and neither is the large- despite the large number of people— ware development projects—bad news for ness of a team. Will a team be consid- to work together with agility. There- large teams that have to deal with rapid ered large if it contains 2, 10, 100, fore, rather than focus on every aspect of agile processes, I concentrate only changes to requirements. That means all 1,000, or even more people? And what impact does every additional order of on those that work differently in large large teams! projects developed by large teams. I ith Agile Software Development in magnitude in staff number have on the process? For example, let’s look at its the Large, Jutta Eckstein—a leading W influence on communication: speaker and consultant in the agile “.