mid last year I dug out of my library an old book called "Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions", which I bought in the early 90's. Despite its goofy (but very apt) title, it is a serious and wide-ranging assessment of problems with the Waterfall approach to software projects, and a review of alternate approaches. it's significance to me is that it's the first reference I can recall to Scrum methodology (along with many other techniques).
I found this after lavishing much time and love on Barry Boehm's "Software Engineering Economics" which initially opened my eyes to alternatives to waterfall. Much as I adored the precision of what Barry laid out in his book, I was finding it difficult to apply in the solution and business spaces in which I was working. Reluctantly, and as I mention - after much labour, I followed authors, publishers and titles (remember, this is all pre-internet) to find the "Righteous Solutions" book.
I was driven to disinterr this book from my own haphazard book stacks after I did the Certified ScrumMaster course mid 2010. Of course the CSM curriculum covers the origins of agile and scrum's place in the world of agile, but I had a nagging thought at the back of my mind that some timeframes weren't fully reconciling themselves.
the CSM course covered then (and I am reminded only this morning in the advertising material for the Agile Alliance 2011 conference http://agile2011.agilealliance.org/ ) that the Agile Manifesto was signed 10 years ago this August.
But my brain was telling me that I had at least read about scrum and similar practices at least 10 years before.
And so, digging out this wonderful little book, I confirmed that Scrum, "Paired Programming" (then called "Handcuffing") and a whole bunch of other interesting approaches were reviewed and analysed in a book published in 1990 and therefore one resumes, evident enough in real life to be noticed, researched and written about during the late 80's. Although the book was published in 1990 - how could I be sure that's when I bought it (or thereabouts). To confirm the timing I found, lovingly tucked between the pages, an article on the "State of the Art" of inter-system communications, torn from the "Byte" magazine in June 1993. that article alone is worth a separate post (once I re-read it).
Why is this significant? Well for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the perspective of how long ideas can take to pervade and disseminate into broader culture, and even more, how long it can take for other ideas to fade, despite their manifold problems: Waterfall is still up there on the altar of methodologies - it seems we've added some things but not removed others.
but its significant for me because I spent a lot of time over the past 4 years looking at how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a fairly large development / integration team (which I left about 4 months ago) and it is really only after being outside the intensity of that group that my thoughts have really collated themselves to the point of writing about them.
so this post is really a pre-amble to a series of upcoming posts covering the potted thoughts of Adam Russell on complex software development.
But find the book if you can and take a look - it is well worth the effort.
I found this after lavishing much time and love on Barry Boehm's "Software Engineering Economics" which initially opened my eyes to alternatives to waterfall. Much as I adored the precision of what Barry laid out in his book, I was finding it difficult to apply in the solution and business spaces in which I was working. Reluctantly, and as I mention - after much labour, I followed authors, publishers and titles (remember, this is all pre-internet) to find the "Righteous Solutions" book.
I was driven to disinterr this book from my own haphazard book stacks after I did the Certified ScrumMaster course mid 2010. Of course the CSM curriculum covers the origins of agile and scrum's place in the world of agile, but I had a nagging thought at the back of my mind that some timeframes weren't fully reconciling themselves.
the CSM course covered then (and I am reminded only this morning in the advertising material for the Agile Alliance 2011 conference http://agile2011.agilealliance.org/ ) that the Agile Manifesto was signed 10 years ago this August.
But my brain was telling me that I had at least read about scrum and similar practices at least 10 years before.
And so, digging out this wonderful little book, I confirmed that Scrum, "Paired Programming" (then called "Handcuffing") and a whole bunch of other interesting approaches were reviewed and analysed in a book published in 1990 and therefore one resumes, evident enough in real life to be noticed, researched and written about during the late 80's. Although the book was published in 1990 - how could I be sure that's when I bought it (or thereabouts). To confirm the timing I found, lovingly tucked between the pages, an article on the "State of the Art" of inter-system communications, torn from the "Byte" magazine in June 1993. that article alone is worth a separate post (once I re-read it).
Why is this significant? Well for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the perspective of how long ideas can take to pervade and disseminate into broader culture, and even more, how long it can take for other ideas to fade, despite their manifold problems: Waterfall is still up there on the altar of methodologies - it seems we've added some things but not removed others.
but its significant for me because I spent a lot of time over the past 4 years looking at how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a fairly large development / integration team (which I left about 4 months ago) and it is really only after being outside the intensity of that group that my thoughts have really collated themselves to the point of writing about them.
so this post is really a pre-amble to a series of upcoming posts covering the potted thoughts of Adam Russell on complex software development.
But find the book if you can and take a look - it is well worth the effort.
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