agile

As compared to other development methods, agile is clear, straightforward, and rewarding for all of those who are involved in the process. Most of you know this already—that’s why you’re here! Clearly, a successful transition to agile requires a strong organizational commitment and a number of management and development changes. With that in mind, the white-hot movement to this trend over the past year continues to amaze me. In striking parallel, the industry has seen this same sort of resonance around the trend to the “cloud”—secure anywhere access by distributed teams to a centralized set of services and compute resources that span the complete lifecycle of the development and deployment process.

Agile and ALM are two terms that you don’t often see side by side. To most developers, agile means team interaction, customer collaboration, dynamism, and responsiveness to change. In contrast, ALM seems to imply the opposite of agile, with echoes of rigid procedures, inflexibility, and top-down process control. But are the agile and ALM approaches as contradictory as they first appear to be?

Lisa Crispin dives into the "we're all in the same boat" theory and explains how it can't be more true in the software development world. From the need for common goals to going beyond taking responsibility for the team's actions, each team must know that you're going to fail or succeed together.

Here is what Mark Lines (Unified Process Mentors, Co-Founder) has to say:

The fact that basic agile concepts are so easy to learn, as well as the proliferation of certification courses with very little investment required has had both positive and negative effects. Certainly the mindshare of methods such as Scrum has exploded in our industry and people are excited about the benefits that agile can deliver in terms of elimination of waste and timely delivery of systems with immediate ROI.