|
Agile Development: an Expert Roundtable
by
Barry Burd
Barry Burd interviewed Brian Sletten, Venkat Subramaniam, and David Bock at the
No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium. The topic of discussion was Agile
Development—its underlying philosophy and its applicability in modern software
engineering. As you'll discover in reading the interview, he spent much of the
time asking for specifics: "Exactly what is agile development?" Of
course, the experts responded with the best answer anyone can give me: "A
very wide range of practices can be called 'agile'."
Barry Burd (BB): Please introduce yourself to the Java Boutique readers.
Brian Sletten: I'm a software developer with about 12 years of
experience. I have my own consulting company in the Washington, DC area called
Bosatsu Consulting. I
focus on forward-leaning technologies like the semantic Web, grid computing, and
aspect-oriented programming. I have a strong background in design and software
development, and I've worked in defense, finance, and 3D graphics.
Venkat Subramaniam: I focus on training, mentoring, and consulting
through my company,
Agile Developer, Inc.
I'm an adjunct faculty member in the Computer Science department at the
University of Houston. This is my fourth year in the No Fluff Just Stuff
Symposium and it's been really fun. I come from a C++ background but I got into
Java just about the time it came out. I spent a number of years with Java, and
jumped into .NET when it came out. So I speak both .NET and Java fluently. I
like both of them (and hate both of them) in a number of ways. Most recently,
I've been focusing on agile development, unit testing, and related concepts.
I’ve been trying to bring some of those practices to the forefront for my
clients.
David Bock: I work for a company in Northern Virginia called
FGM, a government contractor
with about 260 employees. I'm the Technical Director of the Federal Domain. I
work on a number of different projects. The most high profile is an
import/export control system funded by the state department funds and given to
other countries. I'm also president of the Northern Virginia Java users group.
This is my second year with the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium. My talks focus on
architectural issues and on my role an accidental project manager.
BB: What's an accidental project manager?.
David: You're an "accidental project manager" when you get
sucked into a project because you're at the right place at the right time (or at
the wrong time depending upon how you look at it).
BB: Can you tell me more about the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium?
David: The symposium is a great response to certain trends in the
industry. The trends mean less IT funding and less funding for training. Jay
Zimmerman (the symposium's founder) noticed that sending people to national
technical conferences was becoming increasingly difficult. The conferences were
expensive. They took people away from their work during the week. They required
travel funds and the quality of the presentations at the conferences wasn't very
high.
Jay approached the problem on two fronts. To reduce companies' expenses, he
brought his conference to several locations and offered conferences on weekends.
He also focused on high quality speakers. And the best thing for us (the
speakers) is that the people attending the conference are highly motivated. They
give up a weekend to attend, so they ask lots of good questions. They're the
cream of the crop among software developers.
BB: Let’s talk about agile development. Are people confused about the
meaning of the term "agile development" If so, can you help clarify
the term?
Brian: If you look at the factions among the Agile Manifesto signatories,
you'll see that they don't agree on 100 percent, or even on 80 percent of the
details. But there's coherence around the central idea. Agile development
focuses on not getting dogmatic about what you're doing. Get the software up and
running, solving the customer's problems and doing so on budget. Whatever it
takes to get you to that position is consistent with agile development.
BB: That's not a very specific description of agile development.
Brian: It's loose partly because it's a response to the artifact-centric,
process-heavy approaches of the past. One agile approach requires daily
ten-minute stand up meetings to shorten problem discovery time. Another approach
gets the customer involved very early and very often. Either way, the ultimate
goal is to make the problem discovery and resolution phase much shorter.
BB: To what extent is there agreement about the techniques for achieving this
goal?
Venkat: I like the analogy of four blind people touching an elephant. One
touches the ears, the other one touches the tail, and so on. They all come away
with completely different views of what an elephant is. The software community
is like those four blind people. Each person develops an idea of what agile
development is. There is certainly some ambiguity among practitioners, but
there's also a very common theme.
I don’t really care about Extreme Programming or about a specific methodology.
A methodology is problematic if, in order to follow that methodology, you can't
follow anything else. We have to take an agile approach in following agile
methodology itself.
Fundamentally, the goal is to develop an application that meets the customer’s
requirements and solves the customer's problems. Make sure the code you write is
robust and keep the iteration cycle as short as possible. Iterative and
incremental development isn't unique to agile methodology. Rather, iterative and
incremental development is a core value in agile methodology.
David: Several years ago there was a big growth spurt at my company. The
developers realized that we were had a coordination crisis. We started thinking
about more agile development practices. We did a group reading on Pragmatic
Programmers, and another group reading on refactoring. So we had a common set of
skills for maintaining a code base.
At the same time, we started to see government contracts that required a certain
CMM level. CMM (or Capability Maturity Model) is a process-improvement
methodology from Carnegie Mellon University. CMM is pretty heavy-weight. It's
not agile. But even if CMM isn't agile, it was great to have management behind
an effort like that.
I don’t care what the impetus is—whether everybody wants to do Extreme
Programming or CMM. Take any group of people who concentrate on ways to work
better together. That group will be better than a group of people who don't
think about ways of working together. A particular methodology is just the
canvas upon which cooperation happens.
CMM is appealing to upper management because it has milestones. You can say,
"This group is CMMI Level 2, and that group is CMMI Level 4.” (CMMI is a
version of CMM.) It’s nice to have levels, but no group ever accidentally gets
to CMMI Level 4. The groups that get CMMI level 2, 3 and 4 are the groups that
sit down and figure out how to get the level. They institute all this stuff in
order to get assessed at that level. The CMMI level 2 process tells you very
precisely what you need to do. There are things in that process that you would
not normally be doing.
I’ve been through a CMMI assessment. At my organization, four different groups
were assessed. Each involved a half day interview with the practitioners and a
half day interview with the managers. All that interviewing is bundled up at the
end of a long week. The business is very adversary. The practitioner answers
detailed questions. ”Do you have your document of process or your
configuration management plan? Where is that document located? Is it under
version control?” It’s just a very intrusive kind of nit-picky assessment.
Brian: A CMMI assessment starts by not trusting the organization. The
organization proves its knowledge of the process. The organization proves that
it has certain capabilities in communication, in documentation, in the creation
of artifacts, and in configuration management. But with agile development, you
trust the organization as long as the organization delivers. The organization
has to prove that it's adding value by delivering software. Agile development
says "This is what we want you to do. If you can do it, we don't care how
you do it."
New on the Java Boutique:
New Review:
Time Management Made Easy with the Quartz Enterprise Job Scheduler
Why not just use the Java timer API? This open source scheduling
API boasts simplicity, ease-of-integration, a well-rounded feature
set, and it's free!
New Applet:
Reverse Complement
Reverse Complement is a simple applet that converts DNA or RNA
sequences into three useful formats.
Elsewhere on internet.com:
WebDeveloper Java
Lots of Java information on webdeveloper.com
WDVL Java
Thorough Java resource at the Web Developer's Virtual Library.
ScriptSearch Java
Hundreds of free Java code files to download.
jGuru: Your View of the Java Universe
Customizable portal with online training, FAQs, regular news updates, and tutorials.
| 
