Agile Software Development
Автор: Alistair Cockburn /
INTRODUCTION The Impossibility of Communication
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Часть 2
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Agility implies maneuverability, a characteristic that is more important now than ever. Deploying software to the Web has intensified software competition further than before. Staying in business involves not only getting software out and reducing defects but tracking continually moving user and marketplace demands. Winning in business increasingly involves winning at the software-development game. Winning at the game depends on understanding the game being played.
The best description I have found for agility in business comes from Goldman (1995):
“Agility is dynamic, context-specific, aggressively change-embracing, and growth-oriented. It is not about improving efficiency, cutting costs, or battening down the business hatches to ride out fearsome competitive ‘storms. ’ It is about succeeding and about winning: about succeeding in emerging competitive arenas, and about winning profits, market share, and customers in the very center of the competitive storms many companies now fear. ”
The Agile Software Development Series
Among the people concerned with agility in software development over the last decade, Jim Highsmith and I found so much in common that we joined efforts to bring to press an Agile Software Development Series based around relatively light, effective, human-powered software-development techniques.
We base the series on these two core ideas:
· Different projects need different processes or methodologies.
· Focusing on skills, communication, and community allows the project to be more effective and more agile than focusing on processes.
The series has http://www.dvdsite.ru three main tracks, showing
· Techniques to improve the effectiveness of a person who is doing a particular sort of job. This might be a person who is designing a user interface, gathering requirements, planning a project, designing, or testing. Whoever is performing such a job will want to know how the best people in the world do their jobs. Writing Effective Use Cases (Cockburn WEUC) and GUIs with Glue (Hohmann 2002) are two individual technique books.
· Techniques to improve the effectiveness of a group of people. These might include techniques for team building, project retrospectives, decision making, and the like. Improving Software Organizations (Mathiassen 2001) and Surviving Object-Oriented Projects (Cockburn SOOP) are two group technique books.
· Examples of particular, successful agile methodologies. Whoever is selecting a base methodology to tailor will want to find one that has already been used successfully in a similar situation. Modifying an existing methodology is easier than creating a new one and is more effective than using one that was designed for a different situation. Crystal Clear (Cockburn CLEAR) is a sample methodology book. We look forward to identifying other examples to publish. Two books anchor the Agile Software Development Series:
· This one expresses the thoughts about agile software development using my favorite vocabulary: that of software development as a cooperative game, methodology as conventions about coordination, and families of methodologies.
· The second book is Jim's forthcoming one, Agile Software Development Ecologies. It extends the discussion about problems in software development, common principles in the diverse recommendations of the people who signed the Agile Software Development Manifesto, and common agile practices. Jim's previous book, Adaptive Software Development, expresses his thoughts about software development using his favorite vocabulary, that of complex adaptive systems.
You can find more about Crystal, Adaptive, and other agile methodologies on the Web. Specific sites and topics are included in the References at the back. A starter set includes these sites:
· www. CrystalMethodologies. org
· www. AdaptiveSD. com
· www. AgileAlliance. org
· My home site, members. aol. com/acockburn
To save us some future embarrassment, my name is pronounced “Co-burn, ” with a long o.
No book lives alone, as you already know.
Here are some people and organizations that have helped immensely along the way.
Thanks to Specific People. ..
Ralph Hodgson has this amazing library of obscure and interesting books. More astounding, though, is how he manages to have in his briefcase just that obscure book I happen to need to read next: Vinoed's Sketches of Thought and Wenger and Lave's Situated Learning, among others. The interesting and obscure books you find in the References chapter probably came from Ralph's library.
Luke Hohmann tutored me about Karl Weick and Elliot Soloway, and Jim Highsmith, who taught me that "emergent behavior" is a characteristic of the rules and not just "lucky. " Each spent a disproportionate amount of time influencing the sequencing of topics and accuracy of references, commenting on nearly every page.
Jason Yip beautifully skewered my first attempt to describe information dissemination as gas dispersion. He wrote, "Kim is passing information. Information is green gas. Kim is passing green gas. .. " Yikes! You can guess that those sentences changed!
Bo Leuf came up with the wonderful wordplay of argh-minutes (in lieu of erg-seconds) as the unit of measure for frustrating communications sessions. He also was kind enough to double-check some of my assertions. For example, he wrote to some Israelis to check my contention that in Israel, "politeness in conversation is considered more of an insult than a compliment. " That produced an exciting e-mail exchange, which included (from Israelis): "Definitely wrong on this one, your author. … We always say hello and shake hands after not seeing for a few days. .. . I think your author is mistaking a very little tolerance for mistakes at work for a lack of politeness. " Another wrote, "Regarding your being flamed. There is no way out of it, no matter what you say. According to me, Israelis would demand of you to have your own opinion and to stand behind it. And of course they have their own (at least one :-). " Benny Sadeh offered the word I finally used, "frankness. "
Martin Fowler contributed the handy concept of "visibility" to the methodology discussion, in addition to helping with constructive comments and being very gentle where he thought something was terrible.
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