“Agile” has become a common word to use when one would talk about Software development management, so what’s all the fuss about?
A very brief history, in early 2001, a group of very smart people had a ski trip together where they somehow ended talking about software development. The result of these conversations is what’s known as the Agile Manifesto:
Along with the manifesto, they came up with 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto which you can read about here.
What struck me while reading both the values and manifesto is the lack of clear instructions, a plan or a list of processes which would help developers build better software. In fact, “following a plan” was valued less than the ability to adapt and change. Agile seemed to me like an instigator of chaos and disarray.
Being an agile organisation doesn’t say much about how you run your projects. Going through the principles, one would realise that Agile is a culture and a mindset. A mindset that encouraged adaptivity and robustness to the change of the customer’s need; frequent communication and collaboration and continuous software delivery.
This would raise the question, how can something very broadly defined bring order and predictability to the table? I think that the answer is: it doesn’t. Although Agile is often labelled as a methodology, it isn’t; or at least it shouldn’t. However, out of the Agile culture emerged many frameworks which would adhere to the Agile principles such as Scrum, Extreme Programming and Rapid Application Development. If you follow a suitable framework and evolve it to fit with your organisation’s workflow you’d find yourself with a “process”; a robust, adaptive, self-organising process for building high quality software.
Metamorph, our software development firm, was founded at a time where the business environment was, and still is, quite volatile in the region. Entrepreneurs would often approach us with unusual business ideas and needed us to build software to make their ideas a reality. In truth, most of these entrepreneurs, understandably, did not know exactly what they wanted. They were treading new waters and would often change their minds. We, at Metamorph, needed to welcome those changes, so we would ask those entrepreneurs to put their ideas through our agile process. The process would ensure that entrepreneurs are getting exactly what they wanted and are able to change their minds without incurring unnecessary expenses.
At Metamorph, not only did we adopt the Agile culture, but we made it one of our pillars, our core value, something we are proud to be.
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Next week our it’s back to Ahmed where he’ll be talk user-centred design.
