Thesis and Antithesis

David Anderson on Agile. He introduces his talk by discussing some very broad ideas, including how agility has been applied to other areas. He talks about how the agile manifesto seems to have become more about belief and superstition than a scientific model. It's also rarely clicked through - to see the principles behind the manifesto.

The agile community has found it is better to develop in a failure tolerant environment. This was a reaction to the focus on more and more accurate estimates which lead to analysis patterns (or antipatterns). They are antipatterns because there was never enough detail in the analysis to provide accurate enough estimates and to deal with the unexpected.

Through his talk he listed a bunch of thought bubbles on software development:
* Value is providing functionality fastest.
* Knowledge work is perishable.
* Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
* Develop a high trust, high social capital.
* Have a highly collaborative culture.
* Reflect and adjust.
* Sustainable pace.
* Craftmanship.
* Value is contextual, context is temporal.
* Waste over scale.

Traditional industries have relied on bigger batch sizes to provide better economies of scale. With software development the transaction costs causes large batch sizes to work against you. Smaller batches allow you release more business value more quickly and reduce waste (waste over scale).

He introduces kanban which has ideas such as: pull, flow, and regulate work in progress. It does not use time boxed iterations and little or no planning or estimations (at least from a traditional agile approach). It still has constant improvement and delivery. It drops the idea of a generalist approach to labor which is seen by some as waterfall in disguise. The reason this comes about is because at an enterprise scale it's not feasible to hire a lot of experts who are excellent generalists - the labor pool does not exist. This leads to a tension with typical lean principals of reducing waste by having generalists.

He sees two main changes coming in the future: software factories (software product lines - which includes DSLs) and cloud services (deploying web services in the cloud). Architecture and modeling will come back in fashion as a value chain allows incentives for delivering common behavior. He's talking about a 100 fold improvement in productivity through using these ideas.

Finally, he talks about how CMM/CMMI is actually quite a good indication of the ability for software projects to succeed and the industry as a whole. He mentions a report on how agile and CMMI can work together, the idea being that not only is organizational maturity a good idea but it actually means that agile methods can be implemented better (it's called "CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both?!" - I only found a few references, for example Agile+CMMI Panel @ SEPG).

Via.

Still have Richard P. Gabriel's talk to go through too.