Agile Business

Introduction Pattern theory is one of the most significant and potent knowledge tools available, and yet hugely under-utilised, too few people have been introduced to this subject area. It is the codification of successful experience. Each pattern describes a problem context, and then articulates how it has been solved in the real-world on multiple occasions. And by putting multiple patterns together and identifying their inter-relationships, we are able to create pattern languages that enable the improvement of entire systems / entities. Pattern theory was first introduced by Christopher Alexander in the 1960's for town architecture, and has since then been successfully used in other domains such as  software design . Jim Coplien 's book " Organisational Patterns of Agile Software Development " adapted pattern theory for organisational patterns and was one of my first Agile reads back in 2005. Introduced to the concept by Ian Shimmings , the two of us went to...

The Agile industry or Agile community has collectively / organically solved many of the early problems of ‘doing Agile’. For example, in 2003, scaleable elastic infrastructure was a dream, DevOps as a term did not exist, neither did Gherkin, JIRA, Rally, or many other tools now readily available in the marketplace. We now know that Scrum works and has been proven to work, we know that XP design, code and test practices are essential for high quality code and its longevity. We know that BDD  combines both the definition of the system and the testing of the system into a single activity. We can create dynamic, containerised CI development pipelines that measure code quality, vulnerabilities, build quality, build times, and we can integrate our automated tests into multiple suites to optimise our development pipelines. We’ve learned how to become far more objective about product development, we have tools for automating the Product Backlog and providing fu...

I've recently joined T-Mobile as Agile & Online Programme Manager, and although there is an appetite in localised areas for agile adoption, there are some more fundamental areas of change required before real progress can be quantified. Corporate IT strategy, budget governance, resource models, enterprise architecture and software development all need to change and require long-term commitment. Shifting towards agile concepts, mindsets, methods and practices is a significant undertaking and clearly, Toyota's statement of 12 years to "lean" is not only true, but probably an understatement. Over the last few years software developers have often proselyted the use of software patterns, and having read around Alexander's original architectural patterns , I've become a user of organisational patterns. The core, unique benefit of pattern theory is that it is the codifying of experience. This isn't some individual's idea of how to do something; patterns ...

One of the most enlightening and practical books I have read recently is Organisational Patterns of Agile Software Development by Coplien ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0131467409/002-3524002-2666431?v=glance ) Alexander's original pattern theory applied to architecture of towns and buildings. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195019199/qid=1130880069/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-3524002-2666431?v=glance&s=books Design Patterns for Reusable Object-Oriented Software introduced the IT industry to pattern theory. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201633612/qid=1130880169/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-3524002-2666431?v=glance&s=books Coplien's book is the result of 10 years of research into successful software development companies. I'd argue that the use of the Agile word in the title is related to profit rather than a tre depiction of agile patterns. Coplien's book uses pattern theory to describe organisational architectures that can be...