Comments on: Thoughts on software development methodologies

By: Software Developer

Software Developer — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:43:49 +0000

Nice article…..I really impressed while reading your post…..Thank you so much , it will useful to every one….

By: ALM Software

ALM Software — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:59:17 +0000

Hey Everyone,

Excellent post!!! It gives a lot of insight as to needing some form of methodology
when it comes to development projects. I agree with Thibauld in that I have worked for
a company that crumbled because of the dis-organization of projects.

I appreciate the post.

By: Andrés

Andrés — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:24:44 +0000

Hi all,
I agree with Ferran (and the reason is not the fact that he is my boss ). In concrete I found very interesting his last analysis: Short term projects masking iterative processes. My personal experience about that issue is that classical (waterfall) projects are getting smaller and smaller. As a consequence of this,comprehensive documentation, good planing and other supposed features of classic methodologies are disappearing. They act as they have the control but they don’t. Ok, some feeling of “chaos” is arising, but there are lot of things to put the blame on and methodology is not present in their minds.

Regards

Andrés

By: Eliminating Waste: Lessons From The Trenches » SDLC Blog

Eliminating Waste: Lessons From The Trenches » SDLC Blog — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:12:21 +0000

[...] Waste: Lessons From The Trenches As I explained in a previous post, the last year I have been involved in a renewal process of all of our application development [...]

By: Thibauld

Thibauld — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:23:59 +0000

Interesting little survey… I’m not so used to working with big companies but I can assure you that there are problems in SMB too. Actually, the problem is more a lack of methodology. In a previous work experience, I worked for a startup whose CTO has been completely unable to come up with a product! He wanted to use an agile methodology but without exactly knowing what it was.. it ended up being a total mess with the specs constantly evolving and becoming more complex. As he was also a very poor team manager, he totally failed in building the required product and the startup collapsed… great experience but how frustrating!! This is why I now focus a lot on development methodology…
Thanks for this post…

By: Ferdy

Ferdy — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:01:02 +0000

Martin, Xavier, Thanks for your advice!

By: xavier

xavier — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:36:54 +0000

Nice post, sad reading. I think that it is brilliant how you compare all their NOs to their SHOULDs, and how they fail to take the next steps based on the actuals. Flick'ed and blogged a possible way to introduce changes, that may or not may apply to your situation. Good luck!

By: martin

martin — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:18:02 +0000

Very nice summary of your experinece Ferran.

In my opinion a very good selling point of Agile methodologies is accountability. This accountability becomes specially appealing if your development team likes to work and the things they do but they feel frustrated by other departments. Agile methodologies are incredibly transparent and if there is inefficiencies in the processes they will highlight them in few weeks. The problem is that many people see a threat on this transparency as it would be fairly clear that they are not doing their job properly.

I imagine it must be very difficult to introduce this kind of methodologies in an organization like yours. In my experience, a good way to sneakly introduce Agile into corporations would be trying to convince people of give it a try on prototypes, proof of concepts or non-core projects. Small projects of few months. The probably will be successful and slowly the team member will start to appreciate the advantages of development transparency. At least after several succesful projects you would have a sollid argument inside your own company to try to promote the methodology further up.

Cheers.