• Wikipedia : Usability and Experience Study
• OpenStreetMap: UX Review
• any other ?

Usability reviews are of uttermost importance if you want to learn how your end users use your product. I initially thought that conducting usability reviews was complex, and involved lots of steps, but Jean-Francois Proulx definitely convinced me of the approach when I attended one of his usability talks a few months ago.

To me, this is clearly a better investment than having your market-team meet during long hours in front of screenshots trying to shape the next version of your website

Gartner studied the market and attempt to predict trends in their latest report: Predicts 2010: Agile and Cloud Impact Application Development Directions.

As organizations seek to improve productivity and reduce application operating and maintenance costs, we will continue to see an evolution of software development tools, platforms and practices. To take advantage of this, organizations must shift structures and practices while embracing new technologies — a challenging proposition.

Gartner’s analysts (Thomas Murphy and David Norton) predict that by 2012 “agile development methods will be utilized in 80% of all software development projects”. The authors explain that although Scrum will continue gaining in popularity over the coming years, organizations will not be successful in their transition unless they move toward a team-focused culture. As was mentioned in their previous report, very few organizations use a pure-Scrum approach and most rely on an hybrid approach (waterfall and Agile).

The report highlights that organizations struggle to implement true collaboration in the context of globally distributed teams. A situation that has amplified in recent years with outsourcing and off-shoring of software development projects.

In the other hand, the report confirms that teams who have successfully moved to Agile do see productivity improvements especially in “the flexibility of the development team to respond to shifting requirements”. This is especially true for web-based application developments where rapid responses to a changing environment is critical.

The authors point out that organizations need to properly invest in such a transition in order to achieve success.

Organizations that do not make use of key agile practices and do not invest in training and supportive tools’ infrastructure will find that a shift to pseudoagile, while potentially delivering a short-term productivity bump, will end in long-term declines in quality and productivity (…) the promise of four times the improvements in overall productivity has been and will be achieved by select organizations.

Gartner’s report highlights that “development organizations have been making a shift toward agile methods, but this is still slow to move beyond development, and often is a mixture of waterfall practices utilizing an agile or iterative project cycle”. The authors also recommend to “look for opportunities to utilize agile development practices, but recognize that it requires changes and commitment on the part of business and IT”.

Gartner concludes with a few recommendations to help organizations maximize their return from an Agile transition.

• Recognize the cultural changes that are at the heart of agile.
• Don’t allow agile excitement to drive cowboy-coding practices.
• Agile requires discipline.
• Recognize that scrum is only a partial solution, and focus on a collection of practices.
• Find tools that enable collaboration and help automate repeatable, consistent practices.

Related documents:

• Don’t Let Short-Term Agile Create Long-Term Pain
• The Current State of Agile Method Adoption

You might be interested in these related posts:

1. Forrester Reports “Agile Development: Mainstream Adoption Has Changed Agility”
2. You have the best BI application. Great! Do your users know?
3. Nobody is interested in Agile

Bamboo Build View :

Hudson Build View :

If you would like us to develop an integration with your favourite CI server, let us know.

Ayant été en contact à quelques reprises avec Claude depuis quelques années, c’est avec grand plaisir que j’ai signé la préface du bouquin et fait quelques commentaires lors de la lecture du manuscrit.

À quand le prochain bouquin en français au sujet de l’agilité en développement logiciel?

Merci de soutenir cette initiative!
~françois

See the release notes for more details…

As a follow up to my previous post, this second post in a series of 4 short articles written in collaboration with my colleagues Stéphane Lécuyer, Jean-René Rousseau, Sylvie Trudel, Joël Grenon, and Eric Laramée, addresses the impact an Agile transition typically has on some of the traditional software development roles: the project manager, the architect, the business analyst, and the QA specialist.

Based on our experience, here are possible strategies to properly map the traditional roles to the three roles defined by Scrum.

The Project Manager

Traditionally, the project manager is responsible for determining who, what, and when activities need to be performed and then to ensure the team complies with the plan that was prepared to meet the budget, time and scope constraints.

With the traditional approach, project management is based on compliance with the plan while Agile and Scrum propose a different approach where maximizing the business value is the main vector of project management. Under this new approach, the product manager needs to collaborate with the team members and delegate to them some of his traditional responsibilities since they will determine who does what, and when within the constraints of the project.

In this context, the role of the Scrum Master is to enforce the process and seeks to build an efficient self-organized team. To the question “do we still need a project manager in Agile?”, experience shows us that in most organizations, the answer is yes.

The need for accountability, regulatory compliance and alignment with the framework and IT governance are not covered by the role of the Scrum Master and as such remain the responsibility of the project manager.

However, the project manager needs to adapt its management style and use leadership rather than authority with the team to get things done. In the context of a multi-team organizational structure, the presence of a project manager is also valuable, where he is coordinating the teams and the synchrony between them and between entities external to the project teams.

From our experience, some project managers are more willing to become product owners while others will feel challenged by the role of Scrum Master. In the end, it will be the responsibility of the organization to determine how to redefine the roles and their associated responsibilities.

The Architect

Similar to the project manager, the architect is known to play a different role post-transition compared to that required in traditional development teams. He must act as a consultant to the teams and provide them with the necessary support instead of dictating the rules and guidelines to be followed. The architect should also be familiar with the concepts of emerging architecture, where just enough architecture is planned to allow the team to innovate and find the optimal solutions.

The architect then acts as a catalyst for sharing best practices within the organization. Here is a list of practices summarizing the changes of behavior for the architect:

• Is an active member of the development teas, helping to build the right software and acting as consultant;
• Does not attempt to predict the future, he provides a coherent vision but knows that tomorrow’s problems will be easier to solve tomorrow;
• Is changing its architecture in an incremental way, leaving room for emergence;
• Does not seek to document everything to perfection, he focuses on a few relevant diagrams and documents the best practices based on his audience;
• Seeks to validate its concepts through concrete experiences.

Once again, although the role of the architect does change after an agile transition, it remains an important role to be filled.

The Business Analyst

The business analyst is another role that seems neglected by Scrum. To ensure close collaboration between the team and the Product Owner, Scrum ensures that the necessary elements are effectively communicated directly to the team without a formal and complex documentation. However, to ensure continuity of information, we know that functional documentation that is adequate and representative of the software to be developed is essential.

The business analyst becomes a valuable contributor to the Product Owner. The responsibilities of the business analyst are as follows:

• Supports the Product Owner in gathering and writing the required stories;
• Does just enough analysis for the functionality to be carried out during the next iteration;
• Prepares and updates documentation used at the end of each iteration;
• In collaboration with the QA Specialist, helps determine the quality assurance strategy.

In a multi-team context, the business analyst may be called upon to play the role of Product Owner. He then becomes responsible for core components of the product within the various sub-teams.

The Quality Assurance Specialist

Quality is a fundamental concern in Agile project management and each iteration should produce an increment of quality software. To do this, we recommend incorporating a quality assurance specialist within the Scrum teams, and right from the start of the project. A QA specialist assigned to a Scrum team has the following responsibilities:

• Participates in planning sessions to raise issues relating to quality;
• Helps clarify the definition of “Done”‘;
• Prepares plans for acceptance testing;
• Validates the increments of product delivered.

Other Roles

As will be presented next week in “Part 3: Impact on the functional and people managers”, managers also get impacted by an Agile transition.

You might be interested in these related posts:

1. What consultants don’t tell you before you begin an agile transition – Part 1: Impact on the organization
2. Scrum Role: Scrum Master
3. You are not doing SCRUM if you don't have a ScrumMaster

Of course, you still love Java (it pays more) and think it is still the best way to write serious applications (currently waiting for Scala to get decent IDE support ?). You do not want to hear about this over-hyped language that is supposedly perfect because you simply don’t like languages that use half of the keyboard’s non-letter keys as metacharacters.  But you definitely want to hack a little bit using some dynamic language (maybe because you feel like an idiot when these dynamic-language lovers tell you they get a 10x productivity boost by using XXX instead of Java – replace XXX by whatever trendy, over-hyped popular language of the moment).

Anyways.. for some reason, your choice is Python (if not, then the rest of this post is of no interest to you). You have read a book or two online, and since you’re not an idiot, you already know how to code basic stuff (still need to lookup some stuff here and there, not sure of what is idiomatic yet, but you have definitely grasped the basic concepts). However, you feel a little bit alone in this new world, wondering what the best practices are, which tools are generally used.. etc.  And nobody on the internet really helps you because when it comes to giving technological advice, people are either of the “mine is bigger than yours” type, or the “everything depends on your needs/preference/[...]” BS.

So, here are a few things I learned while developping pymager, a RESTful image conversion/rescaling service (hopefully, it will help you to find your way):

• The equivalent of jars is eggs.
• The equivalent of maven dependency resolution/download system is easy_install or the newer pip that is even better.
• The equivalent of ibiblio main repository is Pypi.
• the equivalent of maven is either distutils or setuptools. distutils is the default tool shipped with python, and setuptools is an alternative, that is simply superior. This is what runs your unit tests and creates source/egg packages for you.
• Installing dependencies can be done using several ways : using easy_install / pip (pollutes your system), using your system package manager (e.g. debian/ubuntu apt-get :  super-clean, but does not install the most up to date packages), and easy_install / pip inside a virtualenv sandbox . See Tools for the modern Python hacker for some help regarding virtualenv.
• There are mainly 2 decent stacks for creating web applications : Django and TurboGears 2. Django is for people who like monolithic frameworks that reinvent the wheel, and TurboGears 2.0 is for people who favor integrating best-of-the-breed components. (TG2 gives you this integration for free, so you can see it as an equivalent of Spring ROO ).
• The equivalent of Hibernate is SQLAlchemy. In addition to what hibernate gives you, SQLAlchemy provides you with some lower-level utilities (such as SQL manipulation, DB-agnostic way to create a connection, ..). However, the transaction management is clearly inferior to what you get with Spring/Hibernate and their ThreadLocal implementation is just a hack that is clearly not suited to anything else than using from a web framework.  If you need to do anything more serious, you will need to reinvent the wheel (See pymager’s reimplementation of ThreadLocal’s transaction management ).
• There are a dozen ways to expose a python webapp including nasty CGI-related techniques. All of them are either hacks or legacy stuff except the newer WSGI approach. Most websites use fancy names for describing what WSGi does, but it is mostly an equivalent of the servlet API.
• Cherrypy is a wonderful embedded web server that supports WSGi (and that can be used as a WSGi application itself behind apache, pretty much like tomcat can serve applications behind mod_jk).  It used to be the one shipped with TurboGears, but they switched to Paste for some political reasons. (that was necessary for the merge with pylons)
• Naming conventions are a joke in python, as nobody seems to follow the same rules. Even some modules in the python standard library (e.g.: unittest module) seem to adopt different conventions than what looks like the python coding standard. I guess that too many ex-java developers program in python without being able to let away their java naming conventions..
• As a Java developer, there is some OO purity that you will need to forget about. It seems to be the “python way” to use module-wide variables, and you feel like you are fighting the platform / frameworks if you insist on applying your IoC best practices…
• nose is the way to go for running tests. (it integrates well with setuptools)
• there is no really manipulable classpath, and the default python mechanisms for discovering / handling files/data the equivalent of the classpath is pkg_resources.  (an additional reason to use setuptools)

Une carte bloquée dans le tableau Kanban, c'est du gaspillage

« Cette carte est bloquée car il nous manque un contenu, un fichier sans lequel le site ne peut être mis en ligne. On sait que ça va prendre plusieurs jours. En fait, on ne sait même pas quand est-ce que ce fichier sera disponible. En plus, cette carte n’est vraiment plus prioritaire ».

Voilà ce que j’ai entendu il y a quelques jours. L’équipe a déjà travaillé sur cette carte, le site est bien avancé. En fait, il ne manque qu’un fichier, mais cela bloque sa livraison et, par effet de bord, une case dans le tableau Kanban, réduisant la capacité à réaliser d’autre demandes.

La première réaction est de dire « le Kanban ne fonctionne pas, ce n’est pas assez flexible ». Il suffit de pousser la carte sur le bord et de laisser la place aux autres items à réaliser.

Holà! Doucement, doucement! Un des objectifs de la mise en place d’un système Kanban, est de rendre visible les gaspillages et de permettre ainsi de prendre des actions pour les endiguer et améliorer le processus.

Donc nous avons un succès, un beau succès, Kanban fonctionne bien! Maintenant qu’est-ce qu’on fait?

Nous pouvons identifier plusieurs gaspillages dont les suivants :

• Surproduction : l’équipe à passer du temps à produire un site qui ne sortira peut-être jamais
• Coordination inutile : pendant plusieurs jours, l’équipe a passé du temps à se synchroniser pour cette tâche.
• Changement de tâche : l’équipe doit laisser une tâche de côté et devra peut-être y revenir, cela nécessitera alors du temps pour se concentrer et reprendre la connaissance.
• Délai : la carte bloquée empêche d’autres demandes de renter dans le flux, retardant leur livraison.

Ces constatations m’amènent à poser les questions suivantes :

1. Pourquoi commencer la réalisation d’une carte que l’on ne pourra terminer?
2. Pourquoi une carte se retrouve-t-elle prioritaire un jour et ne l’est plus, deux jours plus tard, une fois en cours de réalisation?
3. Pourquoi commencer une carte alors qu’il y en a d’autres bloquées dans le tableau?
4. Pourquoi commencer une carte alors qu’il y en a en cours de réalisation dans le tableau?

Dans les jours et semaines à venir, je vais aider l’équipe à trouver ses réponses à ces questions et réduire les gaspillages.

Who wrote 2.6.33 reminds us how much the open source world (and in particular the linux kernel community) excels in this area. For the single 2.6.33 release that was developed in about 3 months :

“As of this writing, 10,500 non-merge commits have found their way into 2.6.33 – fairly normal by recent standards. These changes added almost 900,000 lines while deleting almost 520,000 others; as a result, the kernel grew by a mere 380,000 lines this time around.”

So, if you happen to struggle to scale your team past the 10-people mark using your usual development habits, then there are maybe a few things you could learn from the open source world.

My personal understanding of why it works so well :

• good elite developers
• top-notch, distributed, super-fast and merge-friendly version control tools (e.g. git)
• Fault-proof and compromise-free (though sometimes not politically-correct) ways of enforcing software quality and architecture. Examples showing the disagreement-proof nature of the kernel development process include last summer’s Alan Cox vs Linus Torvalds dispute regarding the tty subsystem, or Linus Torvalds vs Hans Reiser argument regarding Reiser4’s plugin system that does not fit well into linux architecture
• result-oriented and meritocracy-driven way of managing the project
• decentralized development (made possible thanks to distributed SCM tools). To quote Linus Torvalds : “Centralized _works_. It’s just *inferior*.“
• modular architecture supporting the collaboration of many developers.  “The large number of developers and the fact that they are volunteers has an impact on how the system should be architected. With such a large number of geographically dispersed developers, a tightly coupled system would be quite difficult to develop — developers would be constantly treading on each others code.“

You might disagree on the reasons why it works so well (after all, that’s just my analysis based on my understanding of the situation), but the success is a reality, a fact.

Also, if you are tempted to think that it could not work in the corporate world, please think about that twice by taking another look at who wrote 2.6.33, where contributing companies are listed.

Nous discuterons (en anglais pendant la session, en français ailleurs si le cœur nous en dit…) certes du Dojo Développement de Paris, mais aussi de comment créer et faire vivre une communauté de personnes ayant un intérêt commun pour un sujet technique, de quelle place accorder à notre formation technique pendant ou en dehors du temps de travail, de l’importance (ou non) de connaître plusieurs langages de programmation, et d’autres sujets tous aussi passionnants en rapport avec l’amélioration de sa technique par l’entraînement.

“”Open source does not mean anarchy. Somebody has to have a vision and the perseverance to see that through. The open source community can then create their own versions if they wish, but it is best if there is a main line, stable version with a consistent architecture with a guiding force behind it,” Gordon said.”

If you have been reading about Agile for a while and are interested in a transition or if you have already initiated a transformation, you have previously heard all the benefits that Agile can bring to your organization but …

Are you aware of the impacts such a transition will have on your organization? On your team? And on yourself? Would you know how to deal with these impacts?

If you believe that implementing Agile within a company simply means reducing documentation, standing up during daily meetings, using whiteboards and post-it notes, and getting rid of the project manager, you will certainly be shocked to see how profound the changes can be.

In a series of 4 short articles written in collaboration with my colleagues Stéphane Lécuyer, Jean-René Rousseau, Sylvie Trudel, Joël Grenon, and Eric Laramée, we aim to highlight some of the most common (and rarely described) impacts an Agile transition can have on an organization. The articles will be published weekly and will cover the following 4 impacts.

• Part 1: Impact on the organization
• Part 2: Impact on some of the traditional roles
• Part 3: Impact on the functional and people managers
• Part 4: Why a coach is useful

Adopting Agile practices is not a trivial change; it requires support and time to become effective. The use of external coaches, training materials, and internal support groups can greatly increase the speed and success of adoption. - Forrester Reports “Agile Development: Mainstream Adoption Has Changed Agility”.

Many organizations rely on external consultants to help them successfully transition to Agile. Others initiate a small transition after having researched the best practices. Having gained experience from the implementation of Agile within organizations over the last 8 years, we can attest that the impacts related to the establishment of an Agile development approach affect many areas in the organization. Through our experience, we have prepared a high level description of potential impacts you may want to anticipate before getting deep into your transition.

Next week’s post will address more specifically to impact on the role of the project manager, the architect, the business analyst, and the QA analyst.

You might be interested in these related posts:

1. What consultants don’t tell you before you begin an agile transition – Part 2: Impact on some of the traditional roles
2. Gartner Predicts 2010: Agile and Cloud Impact Application Development Directions
3. Currently recruiting Agile consultants

Come join us @Confoo for a Scrum simulation using paper prototyping!

Let’s take a very simple example of a very commonly used software that most people use during their work day : the Web browser.

This serves a good example because a web browser is well known by most people and rather simple to use(or should be). For this example we’ll use Mozilla Firefox and the stats published on their website. For everything else we’ll make the estimates as conservative as can be while still remaining realistic.

According to it’s own website*, FireFox is currently being used by 270 million users. For the sake of keeping this example easy, we’ll make the very conservative estimate that only 10 percent of them use it for long period of times at work. That makes this a total of 27 million users. For these few heavy users, let’s pretend that this browser is very easy to use and that users only waste a grand total of a measly 30 seconds a day figuring out things they want to accomplish compared to if it were optimally designed for them. For the sake of this conservative estimate, let’s pretend the average income of these workers is only 10$ per hour and that they work 5 days a week and only do so for 45 weeks per year.

For our example, we will be using the following formulas

Total time wasted in a year in seconds(182,250,000,000) = time wasted per day per employee(30 seconds) * work day per week per employee(5 days) * weeks worked in a year per employee(45 weeks) * number of employees using FireFox(27,000,000)

Total Wasted time in hours(50,625,000) = Time wasted in seconds(182,250,000,000) / Number of seconds in an hour(3600)

Total cost in a year of wasted time due to bad ergonomics(500,625,000$) = Wasted time in hours(50,625,000) * Hourly rate of employees(10$)

This very conservative example should make it clear to anyone that a very small flaw in the ergonomics of a software that is heavily used by a large number of users can have an enormous productivity cost and produce large wastes of money for employers. A very large part of this waste could be prevented or at the very least diminished by the use of proper software ergonomics/usability practices. In following articles in this series, we will publish means and method to help through proper interface design.

*http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/05/firefox_at_270.html

• Gisgraphy Java client : a Java library that gives access to gisgraphy City and GIS features search engine.
• Pymager Java client : a simple Java wrapper on top of the RESTful interface provided by pymager, an image service that provides simple conversion and thumbnailing / resizing features.

• Unofficial versions of the linux kernel, where specific patches are applied (e.g. Xen kernel, openvz kernel, ..) and need to be constantly forward-ported to the latest kernel when it is released
• Distribution-specific changes (e.g. Ubuntu-specific changes to debian packages).

Maintaining one big diff file for all changes would clearly quickly become unmaintanable, so it looks like different approaches are now widely used instead :

• Maintaining stacks of patches, using specialized tools such as quilt.
• Using distributed VCS tools such as git.

How to survive with many patches describes the use of quilt. Here is some background :

“Andrew Morton originally developed a set of scripts for
maintaining kernel patches outside of any SCM tool. Others extended these into a suite called quilt.

It looks like distributed VCS tools have now superceded quilt, as far as pure software development is concerned (linux kernel, etc.). But quilt remains very popular for maintaining distribution-specific changes to packages. Indeed, as distribution packages live outside a SCM tree, it is important to have mechanisms to apply distribution-specific changes to the upstream source packages. And this is where quilt comes to the rescue.

Ubuntu packaging guide describes the use of quilt in debian’s packaging system. Such a simple system is clearly awesome, and the more I understand how the Open Source communities organize themselves, the more it makes me realize how technically advanced the Open Source world  is compared to the corporate world !

No matter how much you might have heard that tooling is unimportant, the reality is that tools are important. Tools enable complex collaboration, and this is clearly an area where Open Source excels.

I discovered a nice application that allows me to wrap my web experience in a nice bundle.

It’s called Quix. And it allows me to use the web on steroids.

Quix is an extensible bookmarklet. It allows you to quickly access your favorite web sites – do an google search, look for a book on Amazon, bookmark a page on delicious… I don’t have to touch the mouse! It’s like a command line tool for the web.

But the real power comes from the extensibility. By default Amazon searches are done on Amazon.com. Since I live in Canada, I find it a bit annoying. So I start to write my own Quix file. You can find it on http://mathieuberube.net/quix/quix.txt.

So far I added these commands to my Quix file:

• Amazon.ca search (a pragmatic programmer) – I overwrote the default Amazon.com search for this one
• SAQ wine search (saq veuve clicquot)
• Javadoc search (java hashmap)
• rubydoc search (ruby array)

Quix has a page to configure custom bookmarklets. I then configured Chrome with the Shortcut Manager extension. Now I just press Ctrl-Q and I’m all set to enter any of the commands above.

Give it a try, you won’t regret it.

Quix in Chrome

Bookmark It

IMHO, it is simply wrong to assume that every single task can be split into small fragments that are then iteratively incorporated into the mainline. The author calls this kind of task a “technically complex story”, and I have yet to see a successful example of migrating frameworks or doing technical migrations like that without resorting to branching. This is what the whole open source community does, and it is high time the “enterprise” world catches with these practices.

Branching then comes to the rescue ! Let the “technically complex story” evolve in its own branch, and make sure to conduct in-depth QA BEFORE the merge. Same thing for code reviews and going through the DONE checklist : make sure to do it BEFORE the merge so that you do not end up with non production-quality code in the mainline, which is then pretty hard to get rid of.

BTW, Version Control Tools gives an overview of the differences between git and mercurial, which are two wonderful SCM tools that are very branch-friendly.

Heh, and I’ll continue to be an ass in all future responses to “John Smith”s who tell talented guys who worked on my projects for years that they aren’t “team player”s, “have an attitude” and are “prima donna”s. I’ll be the judge of that, not some asshole anonymous blog comment poster who has never met or worked with Norm. I’m protective of my team. That’s not going to change. Sorry if you don’t like it.

YES, Gavin King is an ass, but most of the time, this category of ass is right, and people should just listen to them instead of complaining.. ah ah ah love it !

PS: for those who don’t already know it, Gavin King is the founder of Hibernate…

However, there are still a few things bugging me :

• Why insist on keeping the neat features (IoC, ..) server-side only ? Why can’t I just use the same mechanisms for in-container server-side code  and other kind of code ? Do I still need to revert to using Spring for everything that is not running inside the JEE6 container ? What about integrated tests ?
• How come we still don’t have any equivalent to Spring templates, that take care of creating standardized, runtime exceptions and handling opening/closing resources automatically ?

So for now, when working in non-spring environments, I need to create my own Templates to avoid creating clumsy code…

I agree that Spring Framework is a patch, and should eventually disappear. But for it to disappear, the underlying technologies need to start being half-decent…

These data storage systems have a number of features in common:
•   a call level interface (in contrast to a SQL binding)
•   fast indexes on large amounts of data,
•   ability to horizontally scale throughput over many servers, and
•   ability to dynamically define attributes or data schema.

NoSQL explained correctly gives an idea of what these datastores are useful for, and how they complement the current RDBMS offering.

High performance scalable datastores compares the technical  characteristics, maturity and licenses of the  NoSQL offering.

Other links on the subject that might be of interest :

• Twitter is switching to Cassandra
• Common principles and patterns for building scalable systems
• Seeking a database that does not suck

As part of a market research for one of our customer, I came across this report published by Gartner in December 2008.

As the pace of agile adoption increases, development organizations must understand the different levels of agile maturity. CIOs and product and development managers need to assess where they fit on the maturity scale, and which level offers the biggest return in their organizations.

The report presents the 6 levels (from 0 to 5) of Gartner’s Agile Maturity Model and corrects a few myths.

Agile adoption and penetration rates are being overestimated. Although the number of companies that are adopting agile practices is, indeed, reasonably high, most organizations use agile in a very small percentage of their overall work.

An agile maturity framework is necessary to help make the case for adoption, process improvement and benchmarking.

Current adoption rates for agile and iterative methods are between 15% and 25%, when taking into account penetration and maturity, with waterfall still the dominant approach. The pace of agile adoption is increasing.

The report concludes that :

As part of an agile readiness assessment, IT development organizations should access their current agile practice maturity at technical, project management and organizational levels. Practices should be assessed for, among other things, their effectiveness and adoption levels in the organization. Adoption should follow initial pilots, and should normally be Level 2, with the aim of developing a consistent set of agile practices at Level 3.

RECOMMENDED READING

• Maturity Model Overview: Application Organizations

You might be interested in these related posts:

1. Gartner Predicts 2010: Agile and Cloud Impact Application Development Directions
2. Forrester Reports “Agile Development: Mainstream Adoption Has Changed Agility”
3. Will the current economic landscape prevent the launch of new BI initiatives?

I take the official Oracle website to be rather … official ?

Lets recap, shall we ?

a) Almost every trace of OpenSolaris Support subscriptions vanished from
the official website within the last 14 days.

b) An Oracle sales rep informed me personally last week that I could no
longer purchase support subscriptions for OpenSolaris.

More information available on this thread.

Il s’agit d’un jeu concours pour adolescents (Français ou Espagnols) dont le premier prix est de pouvoir rencontrer Taylor Lautner (ceux à qui le nom ne dit rien, ne culpabilisez pas — le monde des stars pour ados est vaste et Google peut vous aider à combler vos lacunes ni vu ni connu) et le représenter lors d’un événement auquel il ne pourra pas assister. D’être, en un mot comme en mille, un “ambassadeur de star”. Au passage, il est question de faire plein de pub sans s’en apercevoir pour le compte de diverses entreprises et d’envoyer des SMS et des MMS comme si on n’avait rien de mieux à faire.

> http://ambassadeurdestar.com
> http://star-ambassador.es

Le projet est mené en eXtreme Programming, dans les règles de l’art. Le site est développé en Ruby on Rails avec TextMate, sur MacOS donc. Nous ajoutons des fonctionnalités tous les jours, il y a au moins une  mise en production par jour depuis l’ouverture au public. L’équipe compte actuellement 6 programmeurs (dont le responsable produit), 2 graphistes, 3 modérateurs et une poignée de stake-holders. Tout ce monde travaille dans un ancien atelier réhabilité à Boulogne, dans une même pièce. L’application web est développée en TDD (à l’exception des vues). Elle est actuellement couverte par 951 assertions, réparties sur 563 tests automatisés qui s’exécutent en 35 secondes environ.

En 4 mois de boulot, nous avons consommé 150 pages de flipchart, 15 marqueurs, 100 fiches cartonnées, 2000 post-its de couleurs et tailles variées, 10 stylos feutre, 5 stylos bic, 2 bloc-notes, 50 feuilles A4, un playmobil et 300 viennoiseries.

Ces mois de travail en équipe m’auront amené à tisser des liens marqués d’une grande sympathie et d’un profond respect pour  mes coéquipiers : un ancien DJ ceinture noire d’aïkido à l’entrepreneuriat dans le sang, un concepteur de jeux vidéo au calme exemplaire, un breton philosophe ancien prof de maths, un polonais increvable et un freelance esthète à qui l’écriture de logiciel importe (beaucoup).

Je suis particulièrement fier du résultat que nous avons atteint, autant pour toutes les bonnes décisions que nous avons prises à temps que pour tous les obstacles que nous avons rencontrés et dont nous avons su tirer le meilleur parti.

… et je me disais que vous auriez peut-être envie de vous réjouir avec moi