Agile India.

It appears to me that the Agile Community is falling behind the innovation curve. At conferences, user groups, mailing list, etc, we see the same old same old stuff (may be I’m missing something). So where is the real innovation happening? What space should I be watching?

These were the questions I posed to the group @ the SDTConf 2009. Later, during our discussion at the conference we tried answering them. After a wonderful discussion we come up with some suggestions:

• Web 2.0
  • Highly Scalability, Performance and Operations space
  • No SQL
  • Continuous Deployment and Monitoring space - Owen’s Slides are a good starting point
  • Watch out for conferences like O’Reilly’s Velocity
• Alternative Language (non-mainstream languages) space. Lot of interesting experiments going on in
  • Dynamic language space
  • Functional language space
  • Hybrid language space
• Domain Specific Language space
• Could Computing, Parallel Computing (Grid Computing), Virtualization space
• Code Harvesting Space - Check out Test Driven Code Search and Code Genie as a starting point
• Complex Adaptive Systems and its implication on our social interactions space. Dave Snowden’s work is a good starting point
• eLearning and visual assessments (feedback) of a programming session. Check out Visualizing Proficiency
• Polyglot Programming space
• With Google Apps, people are able to build 100s of Apps each month and get instant feedback on their ideas
• Social Networking and Second Life space
• Conference: Lot of interesting experiments are been conducted in the conference space. Conferences have evolved to something very different from before.
• Distributed Development and Remote Pairing space

If you would like to contribute to this list, please add your point on the SDTConf Wiki.

At the Agile 2009 conference, Martin Fowler, Ron Jeffries, Chet Hendrickson, Mary Poppendieck and I had a very interesting discussion about “why some of us felt that there was nothing new at the Agile 2009 conference”. (or even if there were interesting topics, the signal to noise ratio was too small to find it).

Martin’s hypothesis (paraphrased):

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, the core of the software development problem with regards to process was hashed out and most of the principles & techniques were flushed out via the Agile Manifesto and other techniques. (which of course was the easy bit). What is happening now is, most companies are trying to implement those ideas on their projects inside their organizations. Implementing those ideas is rather tricky and needs a lot of creative tweaking at project level. Its difficult to pull out any generic topics from these implementation and present it to a broad audience @ Agile 200x confs. Hence it feels like there is nothing new.

After which Martin asked Ron, if he has seen anything new on the mailing lists. Ron resonated with Martin. Everyone else seemed to agree.

Overall I’m convinced that this hypothesis makes sense. However I feel:

• Even though implementing Agile techniques on projects needs lot of creative tweaking, we can still find patterns and meta-approaches to implementing/adopting agile. For Ex: Applying Theory of Constraints and Just-in-Time practices to coaching agile teams.
• Personally I don’t find agile implementation @ large enterprises interesting. But I do see a lot of innovation happening in start-ups and small product companies. They are doing things which agilists might consider taboo. If we look at some of the Web 2.0 product companies, they are solving a lot of interesting problems like deploying to production multiple times a day, embracing fully distributed teams, etc.
• Integrating UX and Operations team into the development team is still an open issue. Few companies have done some interesting work in this space.
• And so on…

I feel majority of the Agile community has got into a “preaching mode” and very few people are actually building their own products (eating their own dog food.) This attitude attracts a certain kind of people to the conference and I’m quite skeptical to find innovative new ideas in this crowd. With so much noise its also very easy to miss some weak signals which have potential.

I do know a few people who are doing some really interesting stuff (they are turned off by the Agile brand and generally don’t hang around in these circles). Personally I want us, as a community, to be more inclusive of these people.

Why do Web 2.0 companies over look the importance of a solid suite of automated tests?

From an end user’s perspective it looks like they use their first thousand users as their manual testers.

I’ll give you an example, today LinkedIn launched a new set of Applications like SlideShare, Amazon, WordPress, TripIt, etc. When I try to use any application by installing it, I keep getting random errors.

There was a problem installing My Travel.
Fix this by reinstalling the application.

Sorry, unable to fetch your blog. Please try again later!

The server did not respond. Please try again.

Its the Web 2.0 companies or the Microsoft’s of the world who can get away with this attitude. If this was a high-end competitive market, such broken applications would result in significant loss of reputation and business.  The Web is certainly changing this. Not sure for the good or bad. On one hand, I like the fact that I can quickly release features and improve it over time. But on the other hand, I don’t like the fact that in the urgency to release new features, we compromise on quality and release dysfunctional stuff.

All I can think is, companies still struggle trying to strike the right balance. They are caugh up in tyring to have the cake and eating it too.