WS-Knowledge

Observation #1: Software is a Virtual World. Hence, we need a source of thoughts & metaphors.

Well, It is obvious that software development is a virtual world and here comes the continuous need for metaphors and design patterns.
A rich source of thoughts can come from experiences with real world professions and hobbies.

We all in software development know about metaphors and design patterns coming from Civil Engineering which I think is the major source of metaphors and design patterns. So, we have Software Architecture, we ‘build’ software programs and create ‘foundations’ for them. We use ‘Creational Patterns’ like ‘Factory Methods’ and ’Builder Pattern’.

The rise of Agile Software Development came from understanding that building a software, which is a virtual structure, differs from building concrete structures. The need for Big Design Upfront (BDUF) is mandatory for building concrete structures since that once you have finishes the structure foundations & moved to mounting or constructing walls your ability to change will tend to Zero. This is not the case when building a software. We can iteratively create our designs and iteratively code required features. It is true that the cost of change gets higher as time goes on. Here comes the need for extensible, flexible, and maintainable code base to enable us to adopt changes since that change is inevitable.

Therefore, although It may not sound much reasonable, I think the chance of developers who have experience with other professions or hobbies, other than computers, is higher than other fellows who owns only computer science knowledge. From this observation I started to think about the need for practicing other new hobbies, away from my computer, to the extent that I think that even fishing or carpentry can be a good source of new thoughts and experiences that can be reflected later while building a new software.

For Dear Reader: If you agree or disagree, it is valuable to hear from you. Thanks in advance.

Is Scrum Failing US ?!!!

For the second time in sequence, I read an article with that shocking title. It seems that the issue is all about misleading simplicity and misunderstood of practices of Scrum and debate about Scrum Master and CSM certificate. I think most of articles mention Scrum not because it is the popular Agile method, but because It is the most misunderstood method and incorrectly practiced. Also, the only method that has certificated practitioners! For example, having a daily stand-up meeting is simple, but what guarantees its successfulness and effectiveness. So, it is easy to claim that you have a daily stand-up meetings regularly and effectively, while, you can not claim, for example, that you are practicing Continuous Integration like in Extreme Programming unless you have CI server and software,  version control system, and all supporting mechanisms. I want to make it clear that I'm not a real Agile practitioner yet. I'm in a Research & Adopting stage. And I found out that the Biggest Exclamation & Question Mark is "How to make sure that I'm correctly practicing Agile and gaining the expected benefits?!" ___not just working in cycles !!! Extreme Programming, XP, was the first method to read about and It was very exiting for me because It has practices and rules to assure staying on track. As a developer I appreciate Unit testing, Test-driven Development,  Continuous Integration and Collective Ownership of Code and their effect on software quality, so that was a big plus. I didn't like having Pair-Programming as a must. I think I faced a problem with Release Planning and Iteration Planning. May be that was the reason to consider Scrum a simpler method while carrying out all best practices from XP.

The Decline and Fall of Agile !!!

I read this blog post about the Decline and Fall of Agile. The title is shocking but the content is illuminating. The comments also made a great elaboration of the idea. In spite of what you may guess from the title, It does not tell that Agile is a wrong methodology and It will soon fall. I'm very interested in Agile development, but I didn't officially  practice it before. So all the time I feel that something is missing. The basic question for me was "What is the different between to be correctly Agile and to just be working in cycles or iterations?" And this is the KEY of Agile development. There is a complete mindset of ideas and practices have to be adopted completely to be truly Agile. That made me think that I'm on the correct route, Since that I'm interested in the mindset of Agile (Agile Manifesto) and the engineering practices coming from Extreme Programming (XP). NOTE: This blog post won't appear correctly in Internet Explorer, too wide to read and scroll! You better use FireFox 3.0 or Google Chrome.

Agile Software Development, Agile Methods, and Agile Project Management Confusion: My resolution --version 0.1

Recently, I did an intensive fast track research about Agile Software Development, Agile Methods, and Agile Project Management. As a result of this research I started to draw my road map for resolution, and this will be the first edition of a series. At the beginning I was very confused about the difference among Agile Software Development, Agile Methods, and Agile Project Management. I didn't know if they are describing the same thing or different topics. Then issues got clearer, so I decided to document this evolution and make it versioned because, sure, It'll evolve more and more, eventually. First format of this document will be as a list, of facts, short definitions, and conclusions.

• Agile  Software Development, Agile SD, are ideas emerged from a community of experienced software developers. This is why the Manifesto for Agile SD starts with

  We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value...

• Agile SD carries new powerful and productive values for software development that can enhance the software technical quality and the final product delivery, at the same time. This is reason behind the debate about Agile Project Management. Valuable principles and practices in Agile SD share the same concepts with the traditional best practices of project management. While, of course, adopting Agile SD will affect the traditional shape of project management and I guess this is the reason for emerging what is so called Agile Project Management, which I think is just about managing an Agile software development environment. I think managing agile software projects is still an evolving issue and didn't reach a final shape. So, I'll postpone searching in Agile Project Management, for a while and continue with Agile SD.
• Agile SD is a set of several methodologies, Agile Methods, that tell new ideas and practices to build a software. Famous agile methods are Extreme Programming, XP, and Scrum. XP is what I prefer currently.

I think the starting point for all of this is to read and comprehend the Manifesto for Agile SD. If you agreed to values and principles that Agile Alliance believes in then you can proceed to read more about Agile. For me, I printed the values & principles and took my time to read them carefully and to try to memorize basic statements. The surprise I discovered that I was close to Agile Software Development all the time. From technically viewpoint, I was interested in many topics like Unit Testing, Code Coverage, Test-Driven Development, Version Control Systems, Continuous Integration, Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection, Data Encapsulation Layer, or Persistence Layer, and architecture articles about building distributed multi-tiered applications, reusability, and loose coupling. These topics are aligned with many Agile SD principles:

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

From practice viewpoint, I worked for about 3 years on projects with a very changing requirements. And the response of project manager was something similar to Agile principles. But, sadly, I rate these projects as failed projects although that they produced software that is still in use and carrying out daily operations for my company. I tried to figure out why we failed although we had same the principles of Agile SD? I found the answer that Agile SD developed methods to guarantee success and complete adoption to principles. So, If you are following XP, for example, you have to plan for releases and iterations and stick to them and when you are in need to make a change, sure you will need, you have to re-plan you iterations or releases to avoid to be in mess of uncontrolled changes. Agile SD provides measures of performance, like Trend Velocity, that you have to use to assess you performance and to estimate suitable work loads. Sometimes,  practiced against the Agile SD practices under the pressure of uncontrolled project environment. I can't guarantee to be correct about all what I stated above but I think I won't be mistaken about it all. So, comments will be much helpful to continue.

Another proof that Agile PM can run under PMI ' s PMBOK Guidelines

For fellows who still think that APM can not run under PMI's PMBOK guidelines, here is another proof. Recently, PMI conducted a course about Agile Project Management, summary is below. PMI.org > Career Development Course Schedule ---------------------------- Agile Project Management- NEW Category:  Tools and Techniques Instructor: Griffiths, Mike Level:  Intermediate, Advanced Status:  Full Seminar Length:  2-Day Seminar CEUs:  1.4 PDUs:  14 PMI Member Early Rate:  $1,180 (US) PMI Member Regular Rate:  $1,299 (US) Non-Member Rate:  $1,525 (US) 04/24/2008 - 04/25/2008 Scottsdale, Arizona, USA Hilton Scottsdale Resort and Villas 6333 North Scottsdale Road Scottsdale, AZ 85250 For course details you may check http://www.pmi.org/CareerDevelopment/Pages/CourseSchedule.aspx?CourseScheduleID=45 For me, questions now became: 1) What is APM? and How to best practice it? 2) For what type, or size, of projects will APM be useful? and in what projects should we avoid APM? 3) Finally, What is the difference among Agile Methods, Agile PM and Agile Software Development? I didn't get this yet.

What about Agile Software Development & Project Management ?

Few months ago, I started to read about & study project management. So, I believe that I'm a newbie for Project Management. But recently,  a question showed up to me. What is relation between Project Management and Agile Software Development? More detailed questions will be: Is there any problem or advantage when selecting one of Agile Methods while following PMBOK Guide®? Is any of these methods conform better with PMBOK Guide®? Is this a totally new issue, or may be wrong issue, to think about? In my humble openion, Agile Software Development may represent a Product Lifecyle for project management lifecycle. But I could not figure out yet how can they work better together. Agile methods concentrate on the communication with customer. They are iterative and recursive, similar to progressive elaboration concept of project definition. They require acceptance criteria and continuous integration, concerned about quality. A lot of keywords that I feel them similar to project management keywords. What triggered this discussion that recently I found the Agile community and sponsors had an event in Egypt last March and they created a nice web site about that event. You can find details of event and download presentations and resources from AgileEgypt.com. Sadly, I missed that event. So, I continued the self-paced studies about Agile Methods. One more observation, there are project management tools available, other than famous MS Project & Primavera, for agile project management environment. They are usually free open source tools, the issue I appreciate too much. How can that affect the project management environment? Some of these tools can export schedule into MS Project format and others can not. Fellows interested in Free and Open Source Software Tools for project management can check VerionOne and XPlanner. I'll appreciate to hear from any and every one :) ~ Waheed