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Hiya, Yes, although I must point out that there's some differences between agile approaches, SCRUM being just one of many options. SCRUM is a methodology, and works best if you have a rough idea of what you're doing (at the risk of your mentioned technology diversity; only quality people at the helm can fix that, and they need to be part of the process just like "normal" developers), but terrible to do any sort of planning or requirements gathering through. User-centred design is agile at its core, for example, and there's a bunch of varieties over the theme. A few years ago I worked as a consultant in a large government organisation, and within the constraints of the contract in place we did everything agile, and I think it went terribly well ... as long as some thinking and planning had happened by smart people upstream from where developers implemented and fixed integration. SCRUM, for example, is supposed to make sure that the planning happens a few iterations before, so that the architect swims a little ahead (which is why it's called upstream :) ) *while* being part of the implementation team. Not all architects can work like that, nor can not all developers, either. You need the right kind of people. As always. And that brings up the skills of the people who's going to inherit the system once the savvy consultants have left. Most places I've worked (in Norway, mostly) have negotiated X amount of billable hours for years after completion, to both fix problems and to train the regular staff, but in financial dire times, this is the first that gets chopped. "Don't worry, Barry will figure it out. Somehow. Before, you know, the launch." Anyway, the short point is; if you know how to be agile and if the people involved knows how to be agile and if the customer knows what it means to be agile (or are willing to learn and take it seriously), it can work miracles. The weakness is that, just as in Waterfall or any other model I've ever seen in place, people of various levels of skill is involved. Some times lower-skilled people thrive once thrown in the agile pit; other time it makes them even less productive. And then, there's politics. And social skills. And ... aaaargh, now I remember why I wanted out, to start over, to do it in smaller chunks. Big government and enterprises have so far not overcome the problem of people being people. We put constraints in place that drag lower skilled people up to a medium of sorts, but it also pulls high-level people down to a frustrating non-productive level. And what happens for skills, happens for projects. Cheers, Alex On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Michael Kay <mike@s...> wrote: >> >> I would be interested if yourself or others have anecdotes of Agile >> applied to large, complex development projects for tailored software >> solutions. We may be going a bit off-piste for xml-dev here so please keep >> it relevant to the list if you do have feedback. >> > > I had some slight involvement a couple of years ago with a successful system developed for online scientific publishing (with MarkLogic at the back end). I don't know the project budget but I would guess over £10m. TDD and Agile played an important part. Although successful, it made me aware of some of the weaknesses: for example it was the only project I have ever seen that was over-tested. In the final stages we were doing performance tuning and it was seriously difficult because (a) internal changes that didn't break any external functionality caused dozens of tests to fail (because they were testing non-visible behaviour), and (b) running a commit took well over an hour. > > The other problem with the project was unnecessary proliferation of technologies: the XML pipeline took data through XQuery, JDOM, XSLT, DOM4J, freemarker, ... inhibiting reuse of code and causing much serialization and reparsing. Basic cause was that when software components are free, it's quite difficult to stop each developer choosing their own favourites. > > Michael Kay > Saxonica > > > _______________________________________________________________________ > > XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS > to support XML implementation and development. To minimize > spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. > > [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ > Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@l... > subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@l... > List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ > List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php -- Project Wrangler, SOA, Info Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps http://shelter.nu/blog | google.com/+AlexanderJohannesen http://xsiteable.org | http://www.linkedin.com/in/shelterit
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