Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
Testing Tools to
Support Agile
Software Delivery
Whitepaper
Posted by Abel Avram on Sep 05, 2008 08:26 AM
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Scott Ambler talks about actual data resulting from surveys made during 2006-2008, showing how Agile is perceived and implemented within organizations. Some of the topics surveyed are: the adoption rate of Agile, the effectiveness of Agile approaches, the effectiveness of various techniques.
Watch: Agile in Practice: What Is Actually Going On Out There?(37 min)
Scott has conducted a series of surveys for Dr. Dobb’s Journal over the last three years on various aspects of Agile development. The results show how Agile is understood and used by people, how many are using Agile, what techniques they are using, etc.
Some of the results presented by Scott are:
Lean Software Development Governance, a whitepaper by Per Kroll and Scott Ambler
Testing Tools to Support Agile Software Delivery
Enable the Agile Enterprise through Incremental adoption of Practices Webcast
IBM software architect eKit: Grady Booch podcast, whitepapers, articles
The Future of Software Delivery According to visionaries Grady Booch & Erich Gamma
...and somewhat cultish.
Why said like that?
Our team management is changing to Agile, is there no difference with waterfall??
Why said like that?
Our team management is changing to Agile, is there no difference with waterfall??
There is a difference. But, many organizations use Agile in waterfall way. The sad part is they don't know about it.
Can this link be fixed?
Overall, the first half of the presentation is a must-hear for anybody who is wondering why they should care about Agile/Lean.
Scott presents very interesting results of a Dr Dobbs 2008 survey:
THANKS!
PS: I completely missed the point with Modeling and TDD. Can anybody shed some light on this?
Having a look to the "Agile Project Success Rates %" slide there are 539 agile projects, which combined with the previous ones gave me a maximum of 125 companies (not hundreds by the way). I might miscalculated it, but if I am true, do you know any other report based on a higher number of surveys, please?
Cheers!
This recent news item points you to a recent, larger survey by VersionOne software. Their sample did include companies NOT using their software.
Sorry, not sure which link you mean. Please email me the url at deborah@infoq.com and I'll get it out there. Thanks!
I think Scott tried to relate or compare the concepts of Design using UML / Modeling techniques vs the generation of the Design by using Test Driven Development and Refactoring.
The basic idea in this sense is that before agile practices, the design was made by taking the requirements as input, applied some techniques and generate the design (and architecture) using models/diagrams as the main output artifact.
While if you use TDD, it comes that the design emerges as consequence of the continuous application and evolution of doing Unit Testing and Refactoring to the code you write.
Thank you Carlos. What is Scott's point regarding these practices in real life? Why oppose both techniques?
Specifying tests should not prevent people from creating some models? I agree that tests are more important than models, but models are still very often required as an aid to development, team members coordination and maintenance...
I guess I will have to listen to that part again... :-)
Olivier,
I believe the point Scott was making is that since the majority of professing agilists don't do TDD then TDD is not a good practice and the converse is true for modeling.
The person in audience questioned the validity of the survey because the majority of respondents do detailed documentation. In my opinion, that is a good question and Scott didn't answer it to my satisfaction.
Maybe Scott's point is that the agile practices that are not adopted by the masses should be cut?
Charles Nutter discusses bringing JRuby to the JVM, why Ruby is hard to implement, JIT compilation, precompilation, core Ruby implementation, Java library access, library challenges and future plans.
Alois Reitbauer specifies several architectural anti-patterns that one should stay away from and which can downgrade an application’s performance.
Teams in large organizations still struggle to adopt TDD. In this article Mark Levison shares problems he uncovered when he surveyed teams, and his own strategy to introduce TDD into an organization.
In this talk from RubyFringe, Luke Francl asks: is developer-driven testing really the best way to find software defects? Or is the emphasis on testing and test coverage barking up the wrong tree?
John Pampuch discusses the HotSpot compiler, the history of Java performance, HotSpot development philosophies and challenges, optimization, JVM library improvements, and tips for better performance.
In this interview, Keith Braithwaite, an Agile developer, consultant and trainer, says that we should show a good deal of skepticism towards today’s Agile practice.
This article demonstrates how to build and orchestrate highly configurable and extensible yet light-weight embedded process flow using AOP techniques with Spring AOP and Aspect J.
Jeff Patton explains why one needs to embrace uncertainty in order to succeed with his/her Agile project and how to avoid some of the common mistakes leading to project failure.
11 comments
Reply