Agile*Product*AI

My first job was at Litton Itek Optical Systems in Lexington, Massachusetts. Itek's business was mostly defense oriented (This was true when I was there. During the 1970s and 1980s Itek was a much larger more diversified company). The most I can say is that Itek built land and space-based reconnaissance systems. This was during the Regan Star Wars craze. There was lots of money being spent on lots of esoteric research programs. There technology and tools were very cool, and I had the opportunity to work with some of the very brightest scientist in the world. It was a very fun place for college grad to land. This is where I cut my teeth on software technology and process. I saw first-hand how software could be harnessed to do amazing things and I learned how important quality and reliability is. Bugs in my software could do millions of dollars in damage and in worst case scenarios injure or kill someone. While we weren't practicing test-first development, the attention to proces...

Agile approaches are primarily focused on producing software artifacts. Organizations that produce products based on these artifacts (like my current employer, Pacific Edge Software) need to understand how an agile software development effort interfaces with the broader product development lifecycle and the organizations that support them. Agile is the way we build software, and it has been institutionalized into development, test and documentation. The interesting thing that's occurred over the last few months is how we've extended agile to encompass nearly all organizations and functions at Pacific Edge including product management, product marketing, sales, and even executive management. I'll drill down on these areas over the next several posts.  Suffice it to say that Pacific Edge has truly become an agile organization.