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Scott Ambler is a good guy. He’s done some interesting studies of project success for agile projects. If interested, you can see a lot of his work here at his agile modelling site.

Scott, in common with many agilists is an advocate of iterative delivery. I’m there!

He also likes to refer to a ‘special’ type of agile iteration, at the inception of a project; ‘iteration 0’. I like this term. As a tech. guy back in the day, I also liked 0-based indexing in programming languages such as ‘c’ but that’s a different story.

Scott and other proponents of iteration 0 are articulating in ‘agilese’ something that has been done for years in regular projects, basically the Reqs Analysis phase, that is:

• In any project, regardless of size or process approach you always have to have an upfront phase to outline at a high level the project goals, business needs and tech constraints/considerations etc.
• The outputs of this upfront cycle do not produce working deployable code or slivers of systems.
• This set of activities apply equally to both approaches; waterfall and iterative.

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One of the more controversial techniques fostered by some in the agile community is ‘Pair Programming’. It is a practice that originates from Extreme Programming, a specific Agile process pioneered by Kent Beck.

It is controversial, particularly for larger corporates because it seeks to adjust human behaviour patterns. In Pair Programming, developers sit side by side, sharing one machine and working in teams of two at all times on a single code base. In reality, it is one of the agile techniques that is likely least adopted and most controversial among programmers for a variety of reasons, mostly cultural and behavioural in nature. Most fundamentally, for a team to be successful at pair programming takes a lot of hard work. It’s a bit like a marriage really, personality compatibility is a key pre-requisite and just like marriages, the best work well but not all will be successful. (more…)