> And being clear we were not using anything that would in anyway be
> described as an agile process. It was iterative and it had software
> engineering good practice, but XP, DSDM, SCRUM it was not.

It could be described as "agile" in the general sense it if provided
the team agility. But let's not argue about that. I agree there've
been and there will be approaches to development that are good that
are not named XP, Scrum, etc. When I wrote "agile" I was attempting to
use the more general notion.

>> None of the other approaches I am familiar with go into as much
>> detail. All these lend themselves to an agile enterprise, and it is
>> difficult to imagine how to become agile without them.
>
> In terms of the tasks yes, but whether it needs an "agile"
> methodology or a decent software engineering process should be open
> to debate.  

That's fine. See above.

> My experience has been that at the enterprise level these agile
> processes fail to work, and for certain types of task they don't
> work either. A key to agility needs to be the ability to not get
> sucked into the "one process fits all" mentality and be able to tune
> your delivery process as appropriate for your current service
> delivery.

No argument... a key to agility is to be able to improve development
processes as well as the developed product incrementally. I don't
believe in one-size-fits-all either. And so success has more to do
with the team collaborating effectively than it does what particular
label they apply to their starting point.

> This is (IMO) where service really help, as you can change the
> delivery process as appropriate for the service, and if it really is
> an area where you know all the requirements and know they won't
> change (maybe a stock control system) then waterfall might actually
> be the best approach.

Maybe. Size matters as much as anything, so if it is a smaller size
and you know everything up front then by all means. However, feedback
matters as well to there is a risk of lack of feedback the greater the
effort and the less you realy end up knowing.

By the way, if you go back to the source, Winston Royce, in the late
1960's, for "waterfall", you will find that even he built one
iteration into his process. That iteration over the most essential
aspects of the system is used to feedback to all the phases of the
waterfall... he literally defined a constrained approach to "plan to
throw one away".

>From Winston himself...

  "If the computer program in question is being developed for the
   first time, arrange matters so that the version finally delivered
   to the customer for operational deployment is actually the second
   version insofar as critical design/operations areas are concerned."

>From the pdf...

http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Process/waterfall.pdf

-Patrick










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