Explaining the benefits of agile

A couple of weeks ago, one of our board members asked me for some starting points to understand agile development, specifically to assure himself whether it could work on larger and more contractually complicated projects.

Clearly I’ve been banging the agile drum loudly. Here’s what I sent him – I hope others may find it useful:

The obvious place to start is the Agile Alliance – which is an umbrella group for agile practitioners. Of particular interest to you may be their list of corporate members

To give you some flavour of agile development, it’s worth looking at some of the experience reports given at last years’ agile conference. You’ll see some evidence of large-scale deployments and get a feeling of the industry heavyweights that are beginning to explore the agile space – including Microsoft and IBM.

ThoughtWorks is a well-known agile consultancy in the UK and has achieved agile projects on a very large scale. There are case studies available on their website.

I’m biased with regard to ThoughtWorks – having worked there briefly – but other structured approaches to agile can be found from DSDM – who are a UK company that licenses their software method. Worth also taking a look at Scrum – whose best representatives in the UK are Conchango. They have some interesting case studies and a useful overview white paper

Agile is certainly not just for small companies: Forrester Research, March 2004, Liz Barnett wrote “Approximately two-thirds of large organisations working with Forrester are adopting (overtly or inadvertently) some form of Agile process for their internal application development efforts.”

Hope this helps as a starting point. One thing I would stress is that an agile approach can require much more discipline than a traditional software development approach. As I mentioned, I’d be more than happy to show you how this works in practice within the Reevoo development team.

Just some example metrics from today’s work on the Reevoo codebase: we’ve checked in code and run all tests 8 times. We’ve released to the live servers, flawlessly, twice. The revieworld codebase has some 952 separate tests run against it after every code integration and the reevoo codebase has some 634 tests.

Each developer – there have been 2 here today – will have run the whole test suite at least 4 or 5 times, and individual tests many times more than that.

We’ve completed two business ‘stories’ – one for Guy and one for Richard. And they’re released, live and generating business value. That’s to my mind the benefits of an agile approach.