Interesting paper from Linda Levine and the SEI about Reflections on Software Agility and Agile Methods: Challenges, Dillemmas & the Way Ahead (see the corresponding presentation slides)
Some other related documents from the SEI are:
See! Not everything from the SEI is about CMM or CMMI ;-) They also a have a wealth of resources on Software Architecture and Software Product-Lines and other areas of Software Engineering!
I came across a great set of responses to an IEEE Software Article by Ted Little that seemed to question the cone of uncertainty. Among the respondents were Phillipe Kruchten and Steve McConnell. This prompted me on a search for resources about the cone of uncertainty. Here is what I came up with:
Does anyone know of others? I'm particularly interested in anything available online by Barry Boehm and also from Steve McConnell. [Updated 2/2/2007 - Steve McConnell emailed me himself with the URL to a recently available article on his website]
Over the past months I've come across a bunch of good links & papers on the topic of "Going Agile" at the program-level:
Michele Sliger (of Rally Software Development) has several good articles and presentations on Relating PMBOK Practices to Agile Practices
On using Agile methods in organizations with a stage/gate approach to program management, see some of Per Runeson's work in this area:
Murray Cantor has some good papers on Governance and Variance as it applies to Agility:
Some other papers & resources:
Those interested in some advanced agile planning concepts should look at Jeff Sutherland's paper on Scrum II - The Future of Scrum: Parallel Pipelining of Sprints in Complex Projects (and the presentation slides that go with it)
There are several REALLY GOOD whitepapers on Adopting & Scaling Agile at Rally's Agile Knowledge Portal, including the following in particular:
There's gotta be some other good stuff out there and Agile Portfolio, Program and Multi-Project Management! If you know of any - please add a comment and hyperlink or URL!
Current issues of IEEE Software, CACM, and ACM Queue have articles related to agile distributed development and release management ...
The Sept/Oct 2006 issue of IEEE Software is about Global Software Development. It has several Agile-related articles (like A Practical Management and Engineering Approach to Offshore Collaboration)
This months CACM theme is "Flexible and Distributed Software Processes" with articles on distributed agile development (which are currently available online), including:
ACM Queue an article on Agile/Iterative Release Management entitled Breaking the Major Release Habit.
Other resources on Distributed Agile Development:
Also, although it's not specific to Agility, the book Software without Borders appears to have some good reviews by several folks who are well-respected in the Agile community (also check out the online references section of the book.
I published a bunch of entries with numerous resources on different aspects of Scaling Agility. I wrote most of them several days apart but many of them got "pushed out" (published) together in sudden bursts. Here they are again:
Feel free to post a comment with other links are anything you feel warrants a new category (e.g., melding Agile with any of Lean, TOC, or Six Sigma)
Over the past months I've come across a bunch of good links & papers on the topic of "Going Agile" at the program-level for large systems and systems of systems. Some of these relate to Agile program Management and others are more about Agile Systems Engineering (and some relate to both). I'll mention the ones on Agile Systems Engineering in this blog-entry and leave the ones on agile program management for a subsequent entry:
That's the best I came up with. If you know of other good links on this topic, please send me a comment!
David Anderson writes about the recent Agile2006 conference in his blog-entry Thoughts for Agile2006:Scaling Agile. The BIG issue for this year is scaling agile across a whole organization. I see this as having three parts - program or multi-project management and the rollup of schedules and resource plans to a Director or VP level; architecture and enterprise level modeling of a domain and data center; and finally configuration management including build, integration, branch and merge strategies, and work-in-progress batching and related communication.
Ive been dealing with this topic a LOT lately in my own organization as part of efforts to spread amd adapt Agile methods across a large distributed enterprise working with large systems and teams. Ive been researching and collecting lots of resources, including some earlier blog-entries on Agile CMMI and Dancing Elephants and Agile Adoption across the industry.
My perceptions of where the "seams" of the enterprise are that are hardest to introduce Agility into are the close collaboration and alignment required across organizational (lifecycle discipline) boundaries and geographic boundaries (and I find the former to be more difficult to surmount than the latter.)
If I try to categorize them as different areas or aspects that each require the ability to be agile, I come up with something like:
I'll be blogging separately with lists of resources of found for several of the above.
Here is a list of resources I've found that I feel are applicable in figuring out how to scale Agility for a large organization and project. (On the subject of metrics and values, I personally find Sam Guckenheimers work to be of greatest interest):
Additions and corrections are welcome!
