Agile Attitudes- Iteration
Ron Morsicato
morsicato at comcast.net
Thu Jun 10 11:43:07 EDT 2004
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Agile Attitudes
Volume 1, Issue 4 June 10, 2004
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Nancy V. and Ron Morsicato will be speaking at the Agile Development
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ference. See below for details.
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Iteration
by Ron Morsicato
If you were a Certified Scrummaster - http://www.controlchaos.com/ -
you'd have access to a discussion list that's been rather heated of
late. You see, every now and then agile developers go back to raging
against the most fundamental difference between agile and non-agile
development methodologies. That fundamental difference is iterative
development vs. what has become tagged as BDUF, or Big Design Up Front.
What's all the ballyhoo about? Well, at Agile Rules we emphasize
the importance of testability, communication, refactoring, simplicity
of design and the like. These things are enabled, or at least greatly
facilitated, by the fact that you're doing iterative development.
Here are some examples.
If you break up development into iterations, there is a natural
point in between iterations to take stock of the project and reflect
on its current progress with respect to where it's going and, more
importantly, on whether it's going in a direction that's suitable for
the current operating environment and business climate. You have at
your disposal inputs from all individuals who impact the project,
sometimes referred to as the Development Community, who are contrib-
uting ideas and suggesting strategic direction based on up-to-date
information. If you did BDUF, those decisions would have to be made by
a bevy of domain experts who are doing their best to predict the
environments of the future in order to settle on the most appropriate
design. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. When you're
agile, it's because you iterate. When you iterate, you minimize the
risk of fixing on an inappropriate design.
Another advantage of iteration is that it allows you to close up
that all-important testing loop. Agile both validates and verifies by
inspection of test results, rather than inspection of design and
implementing acceptance tests that fit requirements. If at the start
of an iteration you write a requirement as an acceptance test and
enlist developers to pass the acceptance test, you have the opportunity
to iron out any disagreement among the Development Community as to the
correct thing to do next.
A third advantage to iteration, and the list here is by no means
complete, is that it presents an ideal opportunity to clean up that
code base. If you recall Issue #2, we spoke about the importance of
refactoring. Iteration provides developers a clear target for when and
how to refactor, maintaining simplicity of both design and implemen-
tation of the design in preparing for that next iteration.
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Public Appearances
Nancy Van Schooenderwoert will be presenting a paper "Taming the
Embedded Tiger: Agile Test Techniques for Embedded Software"
at the Agile Development Conference in Salt Lake City, June
22 - 26, 2004. See
http://www.agiledevelopmentconference.com/schedule/expreports.html
Ron Morsicato and Nancy V. will speak at XP/Agile Universe Conference
in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; August 15 - 18, 2004
Agile Methods for Safety-Critical Software Development. See
http://www.agileuniverse.com/schedule/index
Nancy Van Schooenderwoert will present on "Embedded Extreme Programming
Experience Report and Clinic" in Boston, September 13 - 16, 2004
See http://www.esconline.com/boston/
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