What good practices, if any, have a flexible movement?

Question

I have been speaking agilely for a long time, but one of the things that bothers me about Agile is that many flexible practitioners, especially the younger ones, throw away or miss a lot of good (non Scrum, non XP). The writing style of Alistair Cockburn's “Use of Cases” to mind; orthogonal arrays (pair testing) is another.

I read mainly Agile books and articles and work mainly with Agile folk ... is there something I am missing?

Answer 1

Perhaps it would be interesting in 5-10 years to see how supported these systems are, when no one wrote why a particular decision was made, and all the people who were involved left.

Answer 2

is there something i'm missing?

Yes, I think a lot, but only if you are interested in the Softawre development processes.

I like this paraphrase:

Each project should be as flexible as possible, but no more flexible.

Not every project can be agile ... but I think 80% + can.

I see Agile as the " car of the year ." It is very suitable for most people, but if you need / need something special, for example, a car that can accelerate 300KM / H or a car that can transport 20 tons of goods, you need something else.

There are also so many occasions when you may need something other than a “car of the year,” which requires the book to write them down :-) I recommend you Dexterity and discipline have become easier: practice from OpenUP and RUP . In this book you will find many “missing parts” that are very well illustrated. The key to understanding is that Agility is just a (requested) feature of the software development process that is sometimes impossible to achieve. The book describes several key development principles (which are the basis for RUP) and explains what level of “ceremony” and “iteration” follows from their use at different levels of adoption.

Example

Practice: Automating Change Management and Change Propagation

In your project, you may need very advanced and rigorous change management and make the decision “Automate change management and distribution change” by implementing custom or reconfiguring existing tools and using the change management and control panel.

Effect: this is likely to increase the level of “ceremony” in your project.

Answer 3

(...) throw away or miss many good (non-Scrum, non XP) practices.

Scrum is not prescriptive; you decide how to do things. In other words, nothing forces you to use User Stories, for example (even if user stories work for a large number of teams, there is no consensus), so feel free to use (bright) use cases if you think they are more appropriate in your context, To illustrate this, Jeff Sutherland said that he will never use User Stories again for PDA device designs (they use some kind of “lightweight specifications” in their current company). And the same goes for testing, use whatever works for you. To summarize, if you find that XP is not flexible enough, use something else ... and check and adapt.

Answer 4

Iterative development.

In practice, flexible teams can iterate (or something like that, flexibility is a kind of “true Scot”), but flexible processes do not require or do not define iterative development sufficiently.

Take RUP, for example - clumsy and bloated, it will compile some good methods for long-term development, which are flexible blunders.

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In general, a flexible way to get rid of problems: how to avoid long-term planning, how to keep small teams, short tasks, involved customers, etc. It works more often than not, but sometimes you have to solve and solve problems: how to reach the deadline, do a great job as a team, achieve remote and complex goals, make the customer more demanding. This is when you need to look beyond the limits of flexibility.