Call for participation: What types of organisations adopt agile methods?

[Database Administrator]

Having worked in software development for over 15 years in many
organisations using different development methodologies such as
waterfall, RUP, Scrum and XP, I'm still not sure if there is a
specific 'type' of organisation that is more likely to adopt agile
approaches than others?

I guess it could be argued that those organisations that are more
innovative or open to change are more likely to adopt agile methods?

To try and gain more understanding, and because I have a passion for
software development methodologies, I started a PhD five years ago
(part-time) to look at this issue. I'm now at the point where I'm
conducting a short survey to determine what factors might or might not
influence the adoption of agile methods, in the hope to provide some
enlightenment. If we get enough participation, I then hope to report
this back to the group to see if there are indeed any trends.

The survey is short and should take around 5 - 10 minutes to complete,
so please bare with the scaled questions whereby you are asked to rate
your agreement against a list of statements. To participate, could I
kindly ask you to fill in the survey using the link below -

http://ou1211237011.agile-adoption.sgizmo.com

I believe if we can determine the characteristics of organisations
that adopt and do not adopt agile methods, we can get a better
understanding whether certain organisations are more conducive to
adopting agile methods?

Note this is NOT a marketing survey and is used for doctoral and
practitioner research purposes. All findings and results will be
published to the group and responses treated in strict confidence.
Evidence of my research can be found here:

http://www.computing.open.ac.uk/Publ...tion=computing


Your participation is greatly appreciated.
Kindest Regards
Ant Grinyer
----------
Business Analyst | Cegedim Pharmaceutical Solutions, UK
PhD Candidate | The Open University | Milton Keynes, UK

[Database Administrator]

On Jul 10, 10:37 pm, a.grin...@sky.com (Ant Grinyer) wrote:

> I'm still not sure if there is a
> specific 'type' of organisation that is more likely to adopt agile
> approaches than others?
....
> I'm now at the point where I'm conducting a short survey...

In principle, surveys are device of pre-scm organisations.
Of /modernity/ in the philosophical sense.
- Surveys make it impossible to trace back the contributions,
their context, their treatment, their consequences.
- They sit upon opaque questions, in a static analysis and
distribution, of the problem field, and introduce thus a bias
which it is beyond anybody's possibility to criticize (to
analyse from a critical point of view).

So, surveys are a weapon to sustain tradition, by artificially
producing self-enforcing results: the questions made were
answered, and are thus validated; the people who replied
build up a selected subset, etc.

This is thus authority enforcement.
A device of control, as the opposite to management.

http://www.cmcrossroads.com/cgi-bin/...WantsAnonymity

Marc

[Database Administrator]

Ant Grinyer wrote:

> Having worked in software development for over 15 years in many
> organisations using different development methodologies such as
> waterfall, RUP, Scrum and XP, I'm still not sure if there is a
> specific 'type' of organisation that is more likely to adopt agile
> approaches than others?

I reckon not. I think it is more up to the project manager. A mgr that
is prepared to fight for using agile can succeed even in a company
that has not heard of agile (plenty of those.....).

Regards,

Andrew Marlow

[Database Administrator]

marlow.andrew@googlemail.com a écrit :
> Ant Grinyer wrote:
>
>> Having worked in software development for over 15 years in many
>> organisations using different development methodologies such as
>> waterfall, RUP, Scrum and XP, I'm still not sure if there is a
>> specific 'type' of organisation that is more likely to adopt agile
>> approaches than others?
>
> I reckon not. I think it is more up to the project manager. A mgr that
> is prepared to fight for using agile can succeed even in a company
> that has not heard of agile (plenty of those.....).
>
If the existing applications source code is not OO, it will need a large
refactoring before applying Agile methods like unit testing,...

I experimented such a problem in my former job.

--
Cordialement

Vincent MAHÉ

Ingénieur Plate-forme OpenEmbeDD - http://openembedd.org
IRISA-INRIA, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042 Rennes cedex, France
Tél: +33 (0) 2 99 84 71 00, Fax: +33 (0) 2 99 84 71 71

[Database Administrator]

Vincent Mahe writes:
> marlow.andrew@googlemail.com a écrit :
>> Ant Grinyer wrote:
>>> Having worked in software development for over 15 years in many
>>> organisations using different development methodologies such as
>>> waterfall, RUP, Scrum and XP, I'm still not sure if there is a
>>> specific 'type' of organisation that is more likely to adopt agile
>>> approaches than others?
>>
>> I reckon not. I think it is more up to the project manager. A mgr
>> that is prepared to fight for using agile can succeed even in a
>> company that has not heard of agile (plenty of those.....).
>
> If the existing applications source code is not OO, it will need a
> large refactoring before applying Agile methods like unit
> testing,...

I routinely use test driven design in functional languages and
see no reason why it wouldn't work with procedural languages. I don't
see it as an OO-only technique. What problems did you encounter?

Regards,

Patrick

------------------------------------------------------------------------
S P Engineering, Inc. | Large scale, mission-critical, distributed OO
| systems design and implementation.
pjm@spe.com | (C++, Java, Common Lisp, Jini, middleware, SOA)

[Database Administrator]

Patrick May wrote:
> Vincent Mahe writes:
>> marlow.andrew@googlemail.com a écrit :
>>> Ant Grinyer wrote:
>>>> Having worked in software development for over 15 years in many
>>>> organisations using different development methodologies such as
>>>> waterfall, RUP, Scrum and XP, I'm still not sure if there is a
>>>> specific 'type' of organisation that is more likely to adopt agile
>>>> approaches than others?
>>>
>>> I reckon not. I think it is more up to the project manager. A mgr
>>> that is prepared to fight for using agile can succeed even in a
>>> company that has not heard of agile (plenty of those.....).
>>
>> If the existing applications source code is not OO, it will need a
>> large refactoring before applying Agile methods like unit
>> testing,...
>
> I routinely use test driven design in functional languages and
> see no reason why it wouldn't work with procedural languages. I don't
> see it as an OO-only technique. What problems did you encounter?

What exactly does "Agile development" mean? Indeed, does it even have an
accepted definition?

Someone recently asked me to describe how we write software and then
labelled my description as "Agile software development" but I did not
understand what he meant. We certainly do not unit test in the usual sense
(we simply choose to use (functional) languages that don't suck instead).

My interpretation of phrases like "Agile" is that failed developers try to
metamorphose themselves into guru software development authors by inventing
their own catchy but meaningless phraseology that trendy "real world"
developers latch on to in an attempt to look less geeky whilst projecting
their own wildly incompatible meanings on the words. So I'm expected a lot
of powerfully asserted but meaningless drivel in answer to the above
question. Don't fail me.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u