This morning I sent an email to my development and QA team leads. It was a response to a discussion we had all had a couple weeks ago about the definition of Agile Software Development and whether my plan for next year (2013) was more Agile than our current approach. Below is the bulk of the email.
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The phrase I’d like to call out in particular, from the wikipedia definition, is “a time-boxed iterative approach”.
From Wikipedia
Agile software development is a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It is a conceptual framework that promotes foreseen interactions throughout the development cycle. The Agile Manifesto[1] introduced the term in 2001.
My personal definition of Agile Software Development, as it applies to my current position, involves the following steps:
- Discover and define a problem or opportunity
- Define and design a UI for the minimum set of features to address the issue from #1
- Determine the amount of time worth spending on implementing #2 (At this point, if effort greatly outweighs value, either the problem/op or solution need to be reconsidered.)
- Code-design and implement with the intention to produce simple, high quality, working code in as little time as possible
- Release and monitor
- React and iterate
Between each step there are, of course, discussions held, adjustments made, and iterations on what is the “current truth”.
I would like to remind us all of our goal to be agile and let us cross detail-bridges as they come while planning for future known-bridges.
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In Conclusion: Being Agile is more fun and rewarding than being NOT Agile.
