This was a busy week in the software development world. Gitlab and Github have just announced their plans for the next few years.
While GitHub presented incremental, yet very meaningful, changes to their product, Gitlab went beyond and revealed what they called their “Master Plan.” Among their product news, what impressed me the most was the “Conversational Development” methodology, which they presented as an evolution of agile methodologies, mainly Scrum.
According to Gitlab:
Conversational Development (ConvDev) is a natural evolution of software development that carries a conversation across functional groups throughout the development process, enabling developers to track the full path of development in a cohesive and intuitive way. ConvDev accelerates the development lifecycle by fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing from idea to production.
As I analyzed the principles of ConDev, I noticed several similarities with some basic concepts of the agile manifest. The ConvDev principles are the following:
- Reduce the cycle time to increase effectiveness
- Monitor the process from idea to production
- Thread the conversations through all stages
- Gatekeepers become part of the conversation
- The rest of the organization can contribute
And the alleged benefits are:
- Shipping smaller and simpler changes is more efficient
- Frequent interactions gather more information
- Quicker to respond to market need
- Higher predictability
- Sense of progress
We can all probably agree that most of theses concepts are not new and that some teams have been enjoying these benefits by using other methodologies.
But…
Naming a methodology definitely helps in diffusing its concepts. A few years ago we named our own methodology “Coderockr Way.” It has some similarities with the concepts presented by ConDev, although we opted for an egotistical name.
We have been using these concepts in all our projects in the last few years and we can vouch for each one of the benefits cited above. Smaller and more frequent deliveries indeed improve the team’s velocity and market response, providing greater perception of progress within the team. Moreover, tasks with similar sizes and complexities provide for better delivery estimates, that can be calculated using tools available online.
Planrockr was first created specifically to help our teams increase the transparency of the development processes and to identify aspects of our processes that needed improvement. If you would like to analyze your project under this new methodology, you should definitely give Planrockr a try. You can set up a free account or use the coupon code 50-OFF to receive a 50% discount on the premium plans, which include additional features.
What do you think about this movement? Are agile methodologies evolving to something new?
