Greetings,
A friend recently asked me what I saw going on in the agile world in 2008, and what we might see more of in 2009. I looked back through some of the things I wrote about this year and came up with this.
Organizations are not asking if they should use agile, they are asking how they can adopt agile practices. Accordingly, many of the agile thought leaders have moved from talking about why an organization should do agile to how to do it well. Here is an example drawn from Brain Marick's keynote at a recent conference. A related topic that I've heard often discussed this year is The Power of Done.
The annual 'State of Agile' survey showed wider adoption, and many organizations reporting great success. Over half of the folks responding to the survey reported that 90% or more of their company's agile projects were successful. Details here.
That said, I don't think all of the news is good. Some folks, including James Shore, are seeing so many organizations doing agile so poorly that they fear it will lead to agile's downfall. I wrote about it in James Shore: The Decline and Fall of Agile.
We have seen the rise of 'Lean Software Development' as its own denomination. Some think that it is a possible replacement for agile, while others see it as just another way to be agile. I wrote about it, jumping off of Martin Fowler's thoughts in Agile vs. Lean Misses the Point.
I've seen an awful lot of distributed agile this year, with precious little of it working really well. I don't think that it has much to do with agile though, as distributed development is inherently hard to do well, and far less efficient than co-located development. Still, many teams are distributed, and trying hard to figure out how to make it work better. I hosted a session at Agile2008 which was designed to help distributed teams share best practices and pitfalls, What Makes Distributed Agile Projects Succeed (or Fail?). One of the participants in that discussion, Ade Miller, went on to write a white paper sharing some of the lessons he learned doing distributed agile for Microsoft, and I covered that with the article MS Experience Yields Distributed Agile "Do's and Don'ts."
As for the future...
I think that we will start to see more
colleges and universities creating programs like Bowling Green
University's innovative service learning program The Agile Factory, in which teams of students use agile methods to create real software for real clients as part of their CS degree work.
Cheers,
