Monday, March 26, 2018

My path to 'agile'

My path to 'agile' began by reading Kent Beck's seminal article on Extreme Programming followed reading his book "Extreme Programming Explained" (2000).

Agile became an industry 'thing' after the Agile Manifesto meeting in "2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah" http://agilemanifesto.org/

After that meeting Alistair Cockburn and Jim Highsmith separately fleshed out what Agile development looks like in practice. The books "Agile Software Development" (2002) and "Agile software development ecosystems" (2002) cover this period

Ken Schwaber became one of the key popularisersfor SCRUM. He wrote the book "Agile Project Management with Scrum" (2004) and most Agile today is based on Schwaber's description of Scrum.

However, software engineering management is always in flux and the approach termed "Kanban" has grown in popularity. David Anderson's "Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business" was one of the first high profile promoters of Kanban for software development. Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin's "Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both" (2010) date from this period. Kniberg's "Lean from the Trenches" (2011) provides some very interesting insider accounts/cases remain relevant and influential. Hammarberg & Sunden's "Kanban in action" (2014) is a polished presentation of Kanban for practitioner/managers.

There is now even a thing called Scrumban, combining the 'best' of both Scrum and Kanban.

The related move to 'lean' starts with "Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit" (2003) by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. Eric Ries's "The Lean Startup" (2011), although mainly directed at entrepreneurs, has been hugely influential in software management.

There are some serious related industry attempts to 'scale and standardise' Agile, in particular adapting it for large teams doing distributed development, large scale deployment/operations and as a rigorous approach to 'product management': Initiatives include the Agilealliance's certification services (https://www.scrumalliance.org/), the LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum https://less.works/) framework, and SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework https://www.scaledagileframework.com/).

Consequently best practice agile behaviour for developers and managers is also supported by features within the software infrastructures that we use (i.e. Atlassian's JIRA and Confluence).

So there you go, a quick intro/overview of what we might consider to be key moments and some seminal works in Agile.