MagBlog

New survey by Four Hundred Stuff states that 40% of CIO's and IT directors don't care about quality, or the quality of their products.

While I am not surprised its not difficult to understand.

In a past life I worked for a company, who's UK Managing Director was more concerned about hitting the deadline he has personally agreed to than ensuring that what went out was the best quality possible. His view was that the maintainence agreement was there to deal with that. Suffice to say we soon parted company....

A year or so later I was working for a major telco, who's CTO/CIO was happy for systems to be 80% complete and for the bugs and additions to be added once its live, on the assumption they had got the most important 80% and customers tolerate bugs on new systems. That was more worrying, but I've seen it more and more, senior managers assume software is buggy, and assume users accept buggy software because that is the status quo and therefore it acceptable to deliver buggy software and round we go again....

From the Yahoo Group Scrum Development comes a post about a new website for Agile tools http://www.userstories.com/

This is a new site but is dedicated to providing resource/reviews and product listings on the range of agile planning and management tools on the market.

It looks good, but time will tell if the reviews are truly independent or become a way for people to publish they own tools

SPAMMERS - I don't know why but this entry seems to be particularly appealing to you people. Unfortunately the only way to post is to first create an account, and account creation requires validation, which you will never get, so go away before I hunt you down........

Application Development Trends are publishing an IBM sales paper "Learn how to overcome challenges when adopting open environments, agile methods"

Unfortunately the problem I have with IBM, is the basic fact thats its tools are not exactly Agile, they seem to have created the Jazz platform to rebadge and re-sell their Rational toolset, ClearCase configuration management and Build Forge CI tool along with a few integrated apps such as instant messaging all under the Agile banner

However these tools all exist for considerably less money, and in most cases free. Who wants ANOTHER instant messaging client, when MSN is already installed. Who wants to spend £1000's on IBM tools, and then £1000's more on IBM consultants to install them all and then £1000's more training and adapting them to your process, or ( more likely ) your process to their tools.

its not just IBM, too many companies are jumping the Application Factory band wagon ( is this the new Agile ) and pushing their big expensive tools under a lightweight, agile methodology.

IBM Development Enviroment ( £1000's ) = Eclipse ( Free )
IBM RAD ( £1000's ) = Enterprise Architect ( £99 )
IBM ClearCase ( £1000's ) = Subversion ( Free )
IBM Build Forge ( £1000's ) = Cruise Control ( Free )

Who apart from a major company with unlimited IT budget is going down the right hand side at the moment. With the credit crunch, I'm guessing not many

Before I even pose the question, I know what my answer is personally, but I'll leave that aside for now, and before I provide any more information, lets not worry about the differences between Test First and Test Driven Development, lets just agree that it means code with tests.

The main driver for the question is 2 fold :-

1) Past experience of 2 projects have made me question whether people believe this. A most recent project for a major financial institute had me coaching a development team who's department had a very strange approach to unit tests. While the developers always attempted to write them, they did under the knowledge that a) as soon as the deadlines loomed project managers would drop the need to fix unit tests for defects, in preference to just fixing the code, and b) as soon as the project was completed the unit tests were abandoned as the teams split at project end and rarely came back together. The problem for the coach ( me ) was to convince them that as they were part of an agile project, it should be assumed management would not abandon the principles at the end and therefore unit and component tests are a good thing. On another project, I inherited an Agile Team, who while where very vocal about iterative development, left defects to the end of the project, and rarely practiced unit tests, but regularly stated their Agile credentials.

2) My second issues comes from research I have being doing on Linked In. This is more of a sensitive issue, knowing personally or professionally a number people in Linked In who use Agile Coach as their title, I know a small number who either don't get or don't coach TDD, it makes me question what Agile message is being presented.

Finally the who reason for this discussion is after overhearing a discussion at lunch time between a group of developers from a agile software company discussing how they didn't like TDD.

So can you be Agile without TDD ?

Excellent article on The Industry Standard about how BT adopts agile programming which briefly touches on the mindset changes that needed to take place at BT for them to adopt agile methods

The register posted a rather vacuous article on the scalability of Agile this morning, read about it here "Agile development - can’t scale, won’t scale?".

Unfortunately the article adds nothing to further the Agile knowledgebase, its just another analyst using The Register to try and collect information for a report he is probably charging his customers £1000's if not £10,000's for.

If he was a half decent analyst, he might try some research, talk to people who are actually running large scale projects, and/or have suffered the teething problems which come with the early adoption of large scale agile methods

Roger Leaton, an Agile Advocate at BT has written an article How BT learnt to be Agile about how over the past 3 years BT has been agilising 14,000 IT staff, impacting over 80,000 people. Proof, if needed, that Agile can and does scale and the benefits realised.

Through one of my clients, I have been invovled in some of the work at BT and I can tell from first hand experience that Agile adoption within has not been easy, with many obstacles invovled, but many have been overcome little by little and the frustrations of the early adoptors is now turning to real enjoyment and improvement. Well done to all involved.