2014-10-23

Agile development 2

In my previous post on agile development, I wrote On top of my head I cannot find any special type of application not suited for agile development, having second thoughts about that I could come up with several software development projects not suitable for agile methods. Large IT projects; not only large as in many involved, but also large as in scope, e.g. create a new programming language. If you start to create a new language, you probably need a syntax and a grammar for the new language or a specification of the new language. Just to start develop the new language with two empty hands does not sound right to me. An extreme example of this is the Perl6 language, which has been under development since 2000, in all fairness there has been a working although not complete version since 2010 or so. Perl6 have a detailed pretty static specification, but no time plan ‘it is ready when it is ready’. just lacking a time plan does not make a project qualify as agile. I would not call Perl6 agile. The Perl6 project is as far as I can see well managed, and the most interesting ongoing IT development project I know of. Agile is not the answer to everything.


Detailed time plans are not a part of agile development, but sometimes or rather most of times you need a time plan. Try to tell the boss your latest project is agile and therefore you do not need a time plan. He will not be impressed, he will probably demand  a detailed time plan where one milestone with a deadline is detailed specifications. It will be even worse if you are a consultant trying to sell a development project to a customer. I do not have a good advice how to tackle this situation, personally I cheat a bit. If you read the previous post you know simple use cases are very central to ‘my’ agile model, I call these use cases ‘specifications’. I am a realistic time optimist in the sense I know I am a time optimist. I make up a time plan like this: I start with a rough optimistic time estimate, multiply this estimate with my optimistic factor (2.5) then add another 50% for the unexpected and finally round up to next unit of time, this formula is often pretty accurate. Then I break this down into milestones with desired granularity. Needless to say this is not very scientific, it is sort of case based planning, where I base my time estimates on experience, ‘I know this task takes so long time to complete’.  
While writing this I came across this article. If I got the point of points right, it is a more elaborate ‘time planning’ method than my own but the basic idea is the same.

Once again my intention with this post was to describe an example of agile Business Intelligence, the application and the organisation behind, but if you have followed me this far you can see I failed again. I will make a new attempt to write about that, until then you can read this post.

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