“Cloud” (aka the bureau service of 20 years ago) is a bit like “Smart Grid” in the electricity market – a term thrown around by an increasing number of people with 1001 different definitions.

Cheers

Paul

Cheers, I enjoyed writing it! :)

I agree that when things start to become codified into methodologies that they start to lose some of their ability to respond in the best way to situations. Methodologies become dogmas and so on.

For me, the heart of Agile is this idea that things should be kept “lean”, done with small teams working energetically and communicating constantly. The daily stand-ups are critical, for example. If this is done, and people realise that there is no “procedure”, I think the flexible thinking from Agile will continue to be useful.

I would be interested to know whether Agile is being taught at a university level — that would give some indication of whether the next wave of developers and IT staff coming into organisations will bring it with them. When I was at uni, some of the ideas had started to take hold, but there really was still that formalised waterfall process that drove so many of us so crazy.

I can remember projects from many years ago that were delivered using waterfall methods and do recall hearing the same things about waterfall that I’m reading about agile. You know the sorts of things…’success, innovative, a new IT methodology that can be used by other parts of the business.

It’s interesting to hear that Agile has been around for 9 years now, which does raise some questions in my mind. Namely, is it possible that Agile may / is going the same way as Waterfall? Is the freshness, the innovation, and the successful outcome being replaced by a different rigid, structured methodology that offers a “right” way to do something in exchange for delivering an effective solution / outcome?

I’m really not suggesting that this is happening, but history does teach us that once we start to codify and proceduralise something, we focus more on the process than the outcome.

There are still a lot of code shops out there doing things the “old way”, with pretty regularly disastrous results. You have only to follow the Auditor-Generals’ reports from the various state and Federal governments to see this in action.

That Gear Stream article you forwarded was most amusing — the idea that you can have “Agile inside the box”! It reminds me of the current level of hype around cloud computing. Everything has to have “the cloud” … regardless of what that actually means :)

A very useful article.

Interesting to see that Jeff Smith laments that Agile is not yet as widely adopted as he would hope, and yet Forrester and CIO are reporting that it is now mainstream – which some people lament:
http://www.gearstream.com/blog/14/59/CIO-Magazine-Forrester-Say-Agile-Is-Now-Mainstream-If-So-Be-Very-Afraid.html

The label “Agile” is now just over 9 years old, though the roots of the approach much older than that – already, it seems implementing Agile (capital A) is being given more emphasis than being agile (small a).

Already I have had to clarify what we say when we talk of our own journey to a more nimble, customer-focused culture:
http://blog.global-roam.com/index.php/2010/02/were-going-agile-part2/

Cheers

Paul

Jeff Smith actually said a lot about open source in the interview — he is a very big supporter, both in terms of using the tools internally — especially in the development aspect — but also about communicating externally with the FOSS software community.

I think his belief is overall that the tools are more flexible and cost-effective.

This is what he said:

“Probably ninety percent of our development today is in open source and that is not just in Linux — our testing tools, our development environments, even our identity management. All of that is all open source.

We have seen a tremendous productivity because our developers for the first time are engaging in outside networks. If you think about social networking, IT organisations can be typically very insular.

What I would call the ‘we know best’ logic. When you start utilising some of these different environments it opens up them to a network of people around the world and they become more productive.”

[ Anyone remember Project Firefly? Ballmer was brought in to put a stop to that, and other uses of Open Source at Telstra. ;-) ]