Agile Fun and Games

I have to admit that when I first started hearing about Extreme Programming and Agile methodologies, I was pretty skeptical.  Another software fad that will come and go, I thought. What first started to open up my mind was a conversation that I had with a young developer a number of years ago. I was interviewing him for a position and he was talking about Extreme Programming and I was thinking “Yeah. OK.” Then he said that without Extreme Programming he didn’t think he would still want to be doing development because Extreme Programming had made software development fun again. And that’s when I stopped and thought to myself, “Well, yeah, you know – it should be fun. It’s supposed to be fun.” And by fun, I don’t mean “drinking beer and playing foosball” fun (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Observations from the Agile Alliance Conference – Part 2

At the Agile Alliance conference, Scott Ambler gave a thought-provoking talk entitled “Agile by the Numbers – What People are Really doing in Practice”.

Scott has been conducting surveys focused on the Agile Community for several years. He has made the survey data available at the following URL -  www.ambysoft.com/surveys. The published Agile surveys span the years from 2006 to 2009 and cover the following topics:

• Agile Adoption Rates
• Agile Practices
• Agile Project Initiation
• Agile Certification
• Test-driven Development

Observations from the Agile Alliance 2009 Conference – Part 1

In my last post, I started a discussion on the relationship between Agile practices and Architecture. Last month I attended the Agile Alliance conference in Chicago to learn more about where the Agile movement is headed and where Architecture fits in.