Posts Tagged ‘Software Delivery’
Agile Enterprise Forum 2011
Charles Handy, Chris Potts, Don Reinertsen, John Seddon and I are the featured speakers in the Agile Enterprise Forum 2011. The Forum will be held on March 10, 2011 in the Chandos House at the Royal Society of Medicine, London. Attendance is limited to 30 CIOs.
The theme for the forum is Agility for Complex Organizations. The overarching message is nicely captured in the following summary by James Yoxall:
There are two strands of interest for a CIO: strategy and delivery. The Agile/Lean message can be summarised as “merging” the two, so that delivery can start before strategy is complete, and delivery informs strategy through feedback loops. This leads to a faster/earlier delivery and a better end result.
My own workshop – Agile Governance: Tying Delivery to Value – builds on this message by describing a specific strategic initiative which is not achievable without the use of advanced delivery techniques. Here is the abstract for my workshop:
This workshop will explore mechanisms for unlocking the full potential of existing software through the combination of Agile/Lean methods with technical debt techniques. These mechanisms apply to complex organisations that rely on in-house development teams as well as to third party delivery partners. Israel’s approach emphasizes the need to continuously monitor and mitigate the decay of software that more often than not had been developed over many years. Most importantly, it shows how well-governed software can become the enabler for unleashing the synergistic power of cloud, mobile and social.
You can think of the workshop as linking past, present and future. The “sins” of the past require technical debt reduction initiatives today. These initiatives utilize the classical Agile/Lean techniques of continuous measurement and tight feedback loops. Without such initiative, the value of existing software cannot be unlocked in the future. In particular, competing in the hyper-segmented markets that cloud, mobile and social generate will be next to impossible for legacy software that has not been modernized.
Extending the Scope of 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…
An Update on Agile Business Service Management
A previous post in this blog defined the demarcation line between The Agile Executive and BSM Review as follows:
If software development is your primary interest, you might find my forthcoming posts in BSM Review go a little beyond the traditional scope of software methods. If, however, you are interested in software delivery in entirety, you are likely to find good synergy between the topics I will address in BSM Review and those I will continue to bring up in The Agile Executive. Either way, I trust my posts and Cote’s will be of on-going interest to you.
Since writing these words, I realized how tricky it is to adhere to this differentiation. The difficulty lies in the “cord” between development and operations. Development needs to devise algorithms that take into account operational characteristics in IT. Operations needs to comprehend the limits of such algorithms in the context of the service level agreements and operational level agreements that had been negotiated with their customers (either external or internal). The mutual need is particularly strong in the web application/web operations domain where mutual understanding, collaborative work and joint commitment often need to transcend organizational lines.
Given the inherently close ties between development and operations, here are some BSM Review articles and posts that are likely to be of interest to readers of The Agile Executive:
- The Joys of Real Hardware – what it means to do Business Service Management on a very large-scale
- The Voice of the CIO – a study on the attributes needed by today’s CIO (yes, you had better be agile and Agile…)
- The Quest for a Maturity Model in Business Service Management – while the focus is on BSM, some of the models might apply in a fairly straightforward manner to Agile
- Business Service Management, Six Sigma and your IT Compliance Program – lessons to the champion who has one foot in Agile, the other foot in Six Sigma
- A Measured Approach to Cloud Computing – what it really means to “… make muck so you don’t have to”
- The Case for Agile Business Service Management – the fusion of modern software development methods with the prevailing preference to run IT from the perspective of the business customer
It is a little premature at this early stage to project how BSM Review will evolve. My hunch is that forthcoming articles in BSM Review on cloud computing, large-scale operations, leadership, risk mitigation and technology trends will be of particular interest to readers of this blog.
Agile Business Service Management
Over the weekend we activated the BSM Review. It is a thought leadership website dedicated to next practices in Business Service Management (BSM) in a way that is appropriate for our era. To quote my colleague and friend Bill Keyworth:
This website is dedicated to the BSM dialogue by whoever wishes to participate. There is no fee to join …no content that requires a subscription …and no censorship of reasonable ideas and questions.
My area of focus in this site is Agile Business Service Management. The term is defined as follows:
Agile Business Service Management (Agile BSM) is the fusion of modern software development methods with the prevailing preference to run IT from the perspective of the business customer. Instead of dividing the “world” to development on the one hand and operations on the other hand, Agile Business Service Management unifies the two to manage them as part of one continuum that improves the delivery and usage of the application to the targeted business end-user. By so doing, it crosses the metaphorical chasm between the R&D lab and the customer door (or laptop, or iPhone, or…)
My research agenda in the context of the BSM Review will be outlined in a forthcoming post. For now, suffice it to say it will primarily be driven by two themes:
- Business alignment: At the heart of it, BSM is a discipline to better align business with IT; at its core, Agile is about “customer collaboration over contract negotiation.” The two are conceptually similar: they express the strong desire in both development and operations to carry out meaningful tasks that have business impact.
- Continuous manufacturing: I view IT as a form of continuous manufacturing. If you accept this premise, the application of Agile concepts, principles and techniques to IT management makes perfect sense. Just as Agile has been influenced by Lean techniques from manufacturing, it has the potential now to influences (continuous) manufacturing in its IT incarnation.
If software development is your primary interest, you might find my forthcoming posts in BSM Review go a little beyond the traditional scope of software methods. If, however, you are interested in software delivery in entirety, you are likely to find good synergy between the topics I will address in BSM Review and those I will continue to bring up in The Agile Executive. Either way, I trust my posts and Cote’s will be of on-going interest to you.
The Agile Executive 