A Connected World through Software Architecture - Harry Pavithran : SDLC Agility

InfoQ: Agile Project Management: Lessons Learned at Google

harishpa — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:52:39 GMT

First let me start by saying this is not a blog bashing Google - quite the contrary -this blog just proves that whether your Google or Microsoft SDLC Agility remains a challenge. Just having technology is not a panacea for the problem at hand.

I recently watched this very good talk by Jeff Sutherland on SCRUM and lessons that he learnt as he was helping Google out with their "AdWord project" and I thought I would share my own 2 cents on SCRUM and some common pitfalls that I have seen in the field with various enterprise customers:

Trying to scrum with team size of greater than 4 developers
Trying to plug in waterfall process after doing a SCRUM to adhere to Enterprise Architecture doctrines - by this I mean - not following an iterative methodology trying to have a test or QA and deploy cycle at the release level rather than at the Sprint or Iteration level.
Not monitoring the burn-down charts (this point is highlighted by Jeff as well quite well)
Not having a Release Plan that is independent of the Sprint or Iterations!!
SCRUM only works with smart developer who can work without detailed designs!!
Having a Scrum Master than tries to be a Project Manager!!

InfoQ: Agile Project Management: Lessons Learned at Google

Increasing SDLC Agility

harishpa — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:06:00 GMT

Recently was part of an Proof of Concept for a large enterprise customer where we needed to create a solution to increase the SDLC agility - one of my architect colleagues helped with this Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) an area of System Dynamics. The idea in this picture is to create a top box depicting SDLC governance capablity. The items on the left faucet allow us to add positive attributes to this capablity. The negative aspects to this are time to approve and lack of visiblity on the bottlenecks in the process of approving documents as it may be needed to keep the SDLC process of releasing software on time may dictate. I think that this capablity is enabled by MOSS 2007 out of the box and WSS 3.0 with some custom workflow engineering. The bottom box is all about Team System and how it increases developmental agility to help the overall agility. I thought it was important to add the top box of the often forgotten governance aspect of SDLC that usually slows down the agility. The bottom box shows the factors that help the capablity of agile development. Most of the positive attributes here being core features of our Visual Studion Team System product if you look at from the technology enablers that help this capabilty.