A bit more to IT

I’m going to do my presentation “‘If you have programmer’s on two floors, forget it’: The challenge of distributed Agile” next Monday 2.2.09 at 7.30pm at Napier University.  I’m very excited about the prospect of talking to this group who were so key in getting this research done in the first place.  I’ll put the slides from this presentation up here shortly.

Publicity details for the talk are here.

After an amazingly quick turnaround of a couple of weeks Clarke Ching has announced that his excellent business parable Rocks into Gold is now published.  Clarke is to be congratulated on the speed at which he has managed to get these topical ideas out to a wider audience.

This tale, which shows how a bit of agile thinking can help software people keep their jobs during the credit crunch, is available in three different formats from this site.  Even those whose pockets have already been adversly affected by the credit crunch can partake of this 20 min read because one of the versions is free.  I think that I’m going to go for the paperback version, even though it costs £1 more, because its more tangible than the download version.  Roll on the publication of Clarke’s larger book where the ideas outlined in Rocks into Gold are expanded upon.

Lean thinking has long been an influence on Agile but over the last couple of years we are seeing the links being made more often and by an increasing number of people.  The fact that Scrum owes much to Lean thinking is pretty well known but I suspect that we will be hearing a lot about Lean Software Development and Kanban in the near future.  I don’t really want to discuss Kanban here save to say that I’m interested in it though I have to confess that, as yet, I don’t know very much about it.  The presentation that David J. Anderson gave to Agile Scotland at the end of 2007 about his experiences with Kanban was inspiring and marked it out in my mind as a good way forward.

While an increasing number of folks are investigating the potential of Lean for software development we don’t necessarily want to get into a situation where its Lean Vs Agile.  Martin Fowler has written that the opposition Lean Vs Agile is a non-starter because the two are actually very deeply intertwined.  In saying that, however, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is much that Agile can learn from Lean.  Perhaps the most important thing to be gained from Lean is a proper appreciation of what Kent Beck calls the “social purpose of work”.  It may be that Lean can help address the persistent criticism that “software development often seems to occur in a purely technical context devoid of business or social purpose”.

Richard Durnall, another ThoughtWorker, has suggested that there are four main contexts in which Lean can directly contribute to Agile.  All of these are interesting but its the first and last ones which really ring true for me.  His first idea is that Lean can be used as a metaphor for Agile when trying to explain the benefits to executives.  The argument goes that it is all the easier to put forward an idea when one can compare its benefits with, for instance, the Toyota Production System.  But its his final point that is most significant for my interests.  Lean has a long history of successfully introducing large scale change into organisations and this is something which, Durnall points out, we could do with in IT.  The wider and more holistic perspective which Lean brings is very often missing from Agile as it is practised by many teams, though this almost certainly doesn’t equate with what the originators of the methods or the signatories of the Agile Manifesto intended.

My main research interest has been distributed Agile and in this area we can see that a narrow focus on team and task that characterises some methods, and particularly XP,  wouldn’t be appropriate.  My research has shown how large and small teams are successfully adapting Agile practices and principles to suit their particular circumstances and levels of distribution.  However, this adaptation only works where certain guiding principles are followed but unfortunately up to now there has been little direct guidance on what these core principles actually are.  Experimentation and experience are being used to discover what these are in a process which owes a great deal to the philosopy of learning by doing.  Could it be that Lean thinking is what is required to make this quite haphazard endeavour more systematic?

One of my colleagues writes a tech blog, and very good it is too, where he often discusses the finer points of java development.  Anyway, he has been doing a spike here at work looking into the JBoss Seam framework and thus far its all looking very promising.  He’s been able to iron out many of the major difficulties and happily we will soon be in a position where we can use this for our developments.  JBoss seam is relatively new and as such there aren’t many good short introductory guides to help folks with the practicalities of getting it working.  To remedy this situation my colleague has been blogging about his experiences and writing up some beginners’ tutorials.

Now quite a few people are looking at these posts and my colleague is beginning to get some comments asking for detailed answers to problems including a few emanating from the Indian sub-continent which all seem to have an air of urgency about them.  This scenario will be doubtless be familiar to those folks who write tech blogs or indeed anybody who reads techy forums.  One guy, having followed the steps in one of the tutorials, was having issues with his build, a problem largely resulting from a rather opaque error message (isn’t it always!).  The commenter was very keen to get this problem fixed and stated that if the answer was not forthcoming then they would consider that the “article is only literature for us”.  A choice of words and analogy which left my colleague at first struggling to understand the commenter’s meaning and later imagining his work sitting on the shelves of the library between such literary luminaries as Descartes and Dickens!