Re: Work to the risk was Re: Inspections Was: RE: [AM] ANN: Mashing Deadly My

(responding to Scott P)

> That is, I wonder if an organization with a mature software
> process would gain as much from agile methods, or whether
> some significant part of the gain is from process maturity.

Given two preconditions, an organization that has spent
several years improving their process *effectively* is not
likely to gain much from adoption of agile methods.

The two preconditions are; first; that the amount of change that 
needs to be dealt with is relatively small, and second; that
the organization is always building products that are fairly
similar.

An *effective* process improvement effort would do as much
in refactoring and generalising the lessons learned as it 
would in adding special cases to the process.  Without this,
the process grows unwieldy and heavy, collecting special
cases like secondary tumours rather than like buds of new
limbs.

> Put another way, what part of agile methods' benefits come
> from the methods themselves and what part from the fact
> that they are easy to learn (compared to traditional methods
> that have an extended institutionalization period).

The real benefit comes from the ability to deal with change.
Traditional process improvement can evolve beautiful,
efficient processes in environments where neither the
requirements nor the type of product suffer much change.

Really good traditional process improvement efforts that
are applied in cases where product type or requirements
change a lot will result in agile processes.


Paul Oldfield

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
www.aptprocess.com

any opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of
Mentors of Cally or the Appropriate Process Movement
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

For more information about AM, visit the Agile Modeling Home Page at www.agilemodeling.com
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