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The command-and-control hierarchical organization of large companies is rapidly giving way to a more biological metaphor, one in which a corporate nervous system senses important signals from the market and supply chain and rapidly reacts. At the largest scale, this trend is being driven by principles of Lean manufacturing, which envisions the enterprise as a massive event-driven system, waiting to create products when customer orders arrive instead of building products in advance and holding them in inventory.
Software development has been similarly transformed by Agile development methods. In this arena, the command-and-control ethos is represented by the Waterfall development methodology, which follows a seemingly reasonable pattern of gathering requirements, designing a product, and building and testing. The problem is that requirements are almost always wrong. The Waterfall method does not allow for mid-course corrections, and the beginning-to-end cycle may span a year or even many years.
Agile posits a huge payoff for being highly suspicious of software requirements. In Agile methods, instead of building the whole product, you build the smallest possible useful part and give it to users, who tell you what is right and what is wrong. Agile development is an evolutionary conversation in which incremental steps of two to four weeks lead to feedback that allows requirements to be tested and adjusted. In addition, some functionality is available much sooner.
Quality also increases in Agile projects because using a working system exposes defects right away instead of leaving them to a final testing phase. Many other aspects of Agile are beneficial but beyond the scope of this discussion.
Agile's popularity has led to a problem: How do you apply it at scale? How can a large project run using Agile methods? One team working on one project in an Agile way is not hard to envision. But what about running 10 or 20 teams, each working on part of a product? How does the list for each iteration get sorted out and synchronized? How does the result of each iteration become integrated into the larger whole?
I've been discussing this topic for a few months with Ryan Martens, CTO of Rally Software, a leading vendor of software and training services to support adoption of Agile development. In addition, I saw a fascinating presentation about tracking Agile projects at the New York CTO Club last week in which Bruce Eckfeldt, the founder of Cyrus Innovation, an Agile training company, detailed various methods of tracking progress of Agile projects. |
