Hello everybody !
Today in want to start a serie of articles about agile software development. I’m currently working on a projet where agility is in the middle of all thoughts. It is my first experience in this field as a developper and I’d like to share with you some of my thoughts and question about agility.
As some of you, a month ago, I didn’t know exactly what agility (in software developement) means. I had previously heard some words like SCRUM, TDD or XP … but it sounded mostly acronyms for me !
After some training session, I’m now able to speak about agility and I’m gonna work with it in the next few months.
For this first post, I just want to share some thoughts, links and readings you can have if you want to learn more about agility.
In a sofware development, you can use a lot of methodologies to reach you goal. The agile sofware development (called here agility) is a regroupment of methodologies that you can chose to build your software. [1]
All these methodologies are based on a common manifesto written by the Agile alliance.
If we take a look at this manifesto, we can found the four principles of all these methods :
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
The complete list of the principles behind agile development is available on the Agile Manifesto website. [2]
I don’t know if you already worked in a “classic” sofware development project, but for me, when I read these taglines I said : “Whaoo, If someday we can do all these things on a sofware development project, It could be amazing !”
In a lot of compagny, agile sofware development can’t be used because managers are not yet able to understand these principles. Agility cannot be applied without convictions. Agility is a new way of thinking and it’s not easy to say “Okay, I always worked this way and now I need to erase all my principles and learn a new way to see things …”. You know what I mean ?
I’m writting this article because I’m currently in this position. I always worked with the classic process of my enterprise and now I work on a project where this process is totally out of date ! Firstly we can think that agility is much more for managment and project manager but it’s not true, agility can be spread on all project actors.(Developers, Client, Manager, …).
So the word is, if you want to learn agility sofware development, stop thinking old process, erase a lot of things you’ve understand about sofware development (not all …) and try an agility method ! Hard isn’t it ?
Okay now, some readings about agile sofware development.
In the second part of this article, I will try to explain some agile methodologies.
Stay Tuned !
How to resolve complexity ?
When I first heard about agile development and about it’s uses I said to myself I need to know that software and then m friend introduce me this demo video Watch Taskboard Demo and I watch it and learn from it also by having a little research about agile.