The Agile Executive

For the past 18 months Michael Cote and I focused The Agile Executive on software methods, processes and governance. Occasional posts on cloud computing and devops have been supplementary in nature. Structural changes in the industry have generally been left to be covered by other blogs (e.g.  Cote’s Redmonk blog).

We have recently reached the conclusion that The Agile Executive needs to cover structural changes in order to give a forward-looking view to its readers. Two reasons drove us to this conclusion:

• The rise of software testing as a service. The importance of this trend was summarized in Israel’s recent Cutter blog post “Changing Playing Fields“:

Consider companies like BrowserMob (acquired earlier this month by NeuStar), Feedback Army,  Mob4Hire,  uTest (partnered with SOASTA a few months ago), XBOSoft and others. These companies combine web and cloud economics with the effectiveness and efficiency of crowdsourcing. By so doing, they change the playing fields of software delivery…

• The rise of devops. The line between dev and ops, or at least between dev and web ops, is becoming fuzzier and fuzzier.

As monolithic software development and delivery processes get deconstructed, the structural changes affect methods, processes and governance alike. Hence, discussion of Agile topics in this blog will not be complete without devoting a certain amount of “real estate” to these two changes (software testing as a service and devops) and others that are no doubt forthcoming. For example, it is a small step from testing as a service to development as a service in the true sense of the word – through crowdsourcing, not through outsourcing.

I asked a few friends to help me cover forthcoming structural changes that are relevant to Agile. Their thoughts will be captured through either guest posts or interviews. In these posts/interviews we will explore topics for their own sake. We will connect the dots back to Agile by referencing these posts/interviews in the various posts devoted to Agile. Needless to say, Agile posts will continue to constitute the vast majority of posts in this blog.

We will start the next week with a guest post by Peter McGarahan and an interview with Annie Shum. Stay tuned…