I was working with a Fujitsu/client project team recently as they were refining their approach to developing a replacement application. My role was to help everybody appreciate what was available in Macroscope that might be useful to them, especially regarding some of the bigger challenges in this particular project.

There were differences of opinion within the client team members about how much the approach should be driven by architectures, estimates and plans vs. a highly Agile approach. We had a good idea of the right balance ourselves, but of course needed client buy-in.

Just what is “Agile”

There have of course been many great successes from taking a “big A” approach. The “sweet spot” scenarios involve the need for innovation and rapid creativity, where at the start there is an incomplete vision of the end product. (There have been failures too, but we won’t talk about those here.)

Now the astute Agile practitioner will have caught my deliberate error above. There is no such thing as a “by-the-book big A” approach. There are many books! When one reads about analysis of Agile use, it is usually in the form of “which of these .. are people using?”. Different people are using different aspects of Agile. And sometimes there are great debates between thought leaders about the superiority of some aspects over others – but somehow “it’s all Agile”.

A Bit More Background

To illustrate, let me tell a bit more about the circumstances of the project mentioned above.

• This was to be a replacement system. All the existing functionality had to be preserved in the first release. There was to be innovation to enable easier extensibility, but this was mostly “under the covers”. (Later releases would add new functionality.)
• There were to be some changes to the user interface, but these were being developed by a completely separate team, using traditional techniques of mock-ups, focus groups etc. The development team was to implement this predetermined user interface with perhaps only minor adjustments.
• There were many non-negotiable and well documented business rules to be implemented. High product quality was essential.
• The client wanted to see reduced costs of maintenance and enhancement going forward.
• The client required a very firm estimate for this pre-specified functionality.

So this still left lots of room for agility. We would be prototyping iteratively all the time and we would have co-located subject matter experts to help us validate and refine important details. And we would be developing with small incremental sub-releases, with continuous integration – we would be applying all of the principles and techniques of Agile that would work within their project realities. And we would ignore those aspects of Agile that would lead to failure.

We are still learning. Every now and then, somebody publishes a new set of theories or a new set of techniques which attract us. Sometimes these new things become wildly popular. But the problem is that some people take a “silver bullet” attitude – and believe the latest thing to be a prescription for all our challenges and dismiss everything else we’ve ever learned.

So our challenge is to take the best of what’s new, but keep our brains engaged with the big picture.

Highlights of Scrum for Me - Techniques

User Stories

To me, one of the most powerful contributions of Agile and Scrum to our profession is the focus on the User Story (along with the Use Case). The simple statement, “As a ___ I want to ___ so that ___” gives us an intuitive yet fairly precise view of the business capability that is needed and its justification. It’s easy and it’s natural.