Links for March 3rd

A little something extra

Someone asked me today about interesting topics to write about in the Agile world. Among the list I sent back, here were two I’ve been wondering about a lot recently:

• I’m fond of saying that Agile is a highly disciplined practice –
  just different than the CMM, Rational “discipline.” It’d be
  interesting to someone how quantify that and, if it made sense, argue
  that is was more/less disciplined than other methodologies. For
  example, is Agile good enough for teams working on software for
  missiles, drones, cars, and other stuff where you’d typically
  encounter the cliche of “this software kills people, so we need mega
  process to design it.” Could you go into Lockhead, CSC, SAIC, etc. and
  tell them to drop CMM level 3-5 and use Agile for their big government
  contracts?
• I’m curious how the roles of people on Agile teams have
  changed over time. Developers seem to have the most attention, while
  roles like “business analyst” and “office of project management”
  people are obliterated through neglect and being out of the quick loop
  of Agile. And yet, where we are in Agile today seems to be much where
  were long ago: I’ve been reading up on Behavior Driven Design again, and
  there’s a lot stuff in there that business analysts and the like would
  do – all the “shoulds.” Anyhow, it’d be interesting to see what the roles are in Agile
  teams and how HR needs to change to service those roles. Are things
  still hierarchically done (do employees just one “master,” manager; do you only do one of
  dev or QA with no switching around), or do you get more bang-for-buck if they’re not? Are full-time employee better than contractors?

I certainly don’t have the answers to those questions, but it’d sure be interesting to see what people are finding.

The Links

• Human Matters | New Media and Business Design
• DanNorth.net » Introducing BDD
• Liferay Adopting the LGPL License – Blog – Liferay.com
• VersionOne Winter 2010 Release Announcement | VersionOne
• rad html 5 demos
  Group blog I started for my office mates who're always showing me rad HTML 5 demos. Content is king <eom>
• Running & Managing Virtual Appliances in Production :: GroundWork Open Source (GWOS)
  I'll be one of the folks on this panel going over the use, advantages, and management of virtual appliances. Free to attend, of course.

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.