Going Agile
Martin decided to "shake things up" two years ago. After some gentle nudging from Lou Thomas and Beth Schmidt, his directors of applications development, the team adopted Scrum, which has two-week iterations (called sprints), daily meetings, and frequent iteration reviews and testing. "Our premise is to have potentially shippable product every two weeks," says Thomas.
At Farm Credit, there are six development teams composed of a business analyst, project leader, lead developer, two or three developers, a database engineer, one to three business owner participants and a QA engineer. In place of reams of requirements, development teams write "user stories" as the project progresses, detailing business functionality enhancements and technology, successes and challenges. "User stories are the main mechanism to convey the business needs," Martin says. Farm Credit's waterfall projects used to average 100 or so defects per roll-out; agile ones now average zero to two.
"We've rolled out five key products with phenomenal results," Martin says. "In each case our business owners are ecstatic with the end result."
Agile, Agile Everywhere? Well, No.
CIOs of companies large and small say they have either abandoned waterfall methodologies or are gradually phasing them out. "I don't do the 'I'll deliver everything to you in 18 months'," says Raymond Dury, CIO of Fifth Third Bancorp in Cincinnati, who has adopted an agile method called Extreme Programming. "That's long gone."
But waterfall processes are not, in fact, long gone. In addition to the aforementioned Forrester survey (just 17 percent using agile), a March 2006 survey that polled readers of Software Development magazine and Dr Dobb's Journal found that 60 percent were not using any agile methodologies in their organizations at all.
Perhaps not coincidentally, CIOs are actively looking for project management assistance. Almost three-quarters of CIO (US) readers are either "extremely interested" or "very interested" in finding out how to improve their project management discipline, according to our latest survey.
All this leads to one obvious question: If agile development is so darn good, then why hasn't it been universally adopted?
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