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Agility & Discipline Made Easy: People factors?

 
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The Agile Manifesto states that its signatories value "people and there interactions over processes and tools". And as far as I can tell, it is a well accepted fact that practices and tools "only" have a second order effect on the success of a software development process, that the people working on it are its primary success factor.

How much does your book discuss those factors?
 
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Iija,

yes, the cultural aspects dealing with how people collaborate are crucial, and are often the hardest to change, versus procedures dealing with a set of steps for doing something.

The collaborative and cultural aspects of agile development should be integrated into every practice, rather than described as a separate thing, and we believe we accomplished that. However, we also wanted to directly attack how individual team members need to change their view of what their role is. As an example, as an analyst, your job is not to document requirements. Who cares about that. Your job is to make sure that the intent of various stakeholders is properly reflected in the end application. So, if you documented the "right" requirements, but they were not implemented, you cannot say that it is the developers problem. Your responsibilities includes communicating with testers, developers, etc. to make sure that they understand what needs to be done, to yourself use the application to make sure that it reflects to intent of the stakeholders, etc., and better yet, working on fully integrating various stakeholder into the team. This topic of changing your perception of what your role is to function in an agile team is discussed in practice 7: Everyone owns the product!

We also have a practice 12: Build high-performance teams, which deals with instilling the right values, providing clarity, building trust, etc. This one is crucial, imho.

A key aspect of agile teams is that you have small teams, ideally collocated, with high-bandwidth communication. How do you accomplish this with a 40-person team? Practice 13 deals with how to organize a larger team into smaller teams-of-teams organized around components.

So, these are some examples of specific practices focusing on the collabrative aspects, but you cannot separate collaboration from other practices on doing things, so the book really incorporates collaboration into the various practices.

Cheers

/Per
 
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Does your book also discuss Agile programming compared to Object Oriented for example. I am completely unfamiliar with this so I am curious to know how suitable it is for someone with no knowledge on the subject.

Thanks.
George
 
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I have heard about Agile programming and my manager keeps reading a lot about it. But how different it is from any other programming framework or work flow I wonder?
 
Ilja Preuss
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Per, thanks for your answer!

Originally posted by Per Kroll:
A key aspect of agile teams is that you have small teams, ideally collocated, with high-bandwidth communication. How do you accomplish this with a 40-person team? Practice 13 deals with how to organize a larger team into smaller teams-of-teams organized around components.



Do you know the works of Jutta Eckstein? I've heard her say that being Agile might be harder with bigger teams, but actually also is even more important...
 
Ilja Preuss
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Originally posted by George Stoianov:
Does your book also discuss Agile programming compared to Object Oriented for example. I am completely unfamiliar with this so I am curious to know how suitable it is for someone with no knowledge on the subject.



Agile Software Development an OOP are totally orthogonal concepts. Basically, the former is about how you organize your team, the latter about how you organize your code.
 
Ilja Preuss
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Originally posted by vishwanath nadimpally:
I have heard about Agile programming and my manager keeps reading a lot about it. But how different it is from any other programming framework or work flow I wonder?



Agile Software Development is neither a framework nor a work flow. It's basically a set of Values and Principles that guide you in choosing how to organize your work. See http://www.agilemanifesto.org/
 
Per Kroll
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Iija, thanks for the book recommendation. No, I have not familiar with Jutta's book (but I think I was introduced to her at the Agile 2006 conference). Looks interesting, I will read it.

Cheers

/Per
 
Ilja Preuss
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I haven't read their book either - I never worked on that big teams yet. I've heard her talk at several occasions, though, and it has always been quite intriguing...
 
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