Agile*Product*AI

I just returned from the 2006 Project & Portfolio Management Summit. It’s an event that is put on by Gartner every year where they roll-out their annual analysis of the PPM market. Since this is Pacific Edge Software's primary market, it was critical that we made a good showing. And since were a small company in this market (CA, IBM, Microsoft, Compuware, Mercury and others have acquired their way in over the last couple years), we decided we wanted to look and feel different from the others. So, I presented "Worlds Collide: Agile Development meets PPM." PPM advocates tend to have a traditional project management and methodology focus. I was expecting my talk to be a bit on the controversial side as PPM-types tend to focus on change control, well defined business processes, approvals, and lots of other things that repulse most agile types. I was pleasantly surprised. I basically structured my presentation as a case study on Pacific Edge. We are a hardcore agile shop w...

An essential element of agile development is rhythm. As with musical composition where there are different levels of periodicity in the same passage of music, an agile development approach has nested levels of rhythm that serve different needs and interleave to form an efficient, vibrant software development approach. The build automation system is the metronome of the software engineers. It sets the pace for code submissions, defect resolution, unit testing, peer code integration and more. Weekly feature drops are the metronome for quality assurance. Stabile delivery of weekly features drive the test organization. Sprints are the metronome of the product development team. They provide high-level integration points, usability analysis and feedback, and project visibility. The highest level of periodicity is the release. It is the synchronization point for the entire organization with the customer.