On Tuesday June 24th, I attended a session with Mary Poppendieck at the IT University of Denmark. Mary did a talk with the title "Is Agile a Fad?" with the subtitle "Will Agile Software Development end on the Dumping Grounds of History?". Bestbrains had invited to the session with Mary.
Mary talked about different Fads in history and boxed the past in decades, starting from 1960 with Ad-hoc processes going to more structure in the 1970 up to the Agile movement in 2000.
I thing one of the interesting points Mary talked about, was the big changes in processes looking back in the history. She visualized it with a pendulum going from ad-hoc to very structured and back again. It is a rather binary approach with no stop in the middle.
Why don't we learn from the knowledge archived in the past and find a balanced state in the middle not having either A or B but the best from both sides according to the current needs?
I strongly agree with Mary and I think it is an important point to realize that you should not just look at a new process as the silver bullet to solve all your problems. You have to build your own recipe according to your own needs and context. It is more important to establish a structure with focus on continuous improvement than to implement a specific process like Scrum, XP, RUP, CMMI etc.
Bent Jensen from Bestbrains introducing Mary Poppendieck
Many organizations are introducing Agile practices like Scrum, XP etc. to get some more value in software development. An important area that is not covered so much with Agile practices is the more holistic view of the whole system. In many situations Agile practices are focused against the development team as the primary area and not covering the end-to-end processes involving the total value stream from problem to solution.
A combination I have seen working well is to combine practices from both Agile and Lean Software to get both the team and end-to-end processes handled in a sustainable way.
Don't only look at the team by introducing Scrum or another (silver bullet) process. You need to start changing the total system in the organization involving all people.
It is Business-IT alignment and one of the key roles is the Product Owner / Product Manager / Product Champignon etc., because this is one of the good candidates of a bottleneck for the rhythm in the total value stream.