Prominent practitioners and writers introduced four popular approaches at Agile2006 in the "Agile Styles" talk. In the first half of the presentation, Alistair Cockburn talked about his Crystal Methodologies and David J. Anderson presented Feature Driven Development (FDD).
InfoQ recently had the opportunity to ask 8aweek co-founders Dave Fowler and Zachary Garbow some questions about how they connect with users, prioritize work, and get things done.
In an interview with Stefan Roock, Jeff De Luca, who created and documented Feature Driven Development, discussed developing an overall model, code ownership, choosing an agile method, and more.
Pete Behrens, trainer and organizational Agility consultant, recently blogged about the contentious topic of certification. He noted that both Scrum and FDD have 2-day basic certification programs, while "XP has remained silent on the topic," and called on the Agile community to begin looking at a true Agile Certification Process.
Although it keeps people busy, managing tasks is neither interesting nor useful. Managing value created provides greater leverage and greater risk management. Jon Kern blogged last week on creating good features (rather than tasks) by focusing on value and testability. But do we sometimes need to manage tasks, too? David Anderson used the Theory of Constraints to back an unexpected answer.
Stick Minds has posted two reviews of David Anderson's "Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results", in which Anderson combines TOC and Agile approaches. The book targets senior IT executives, project managers, development managers, and team leads. Do manufacturing metrics really enhance Agile software development? Apparently the jury is out.
First described in 1999, FDD was dismissed by some as "waterfallish". But it has developed into a complete methodology and is still in use. Is it truly Agile? Brad Appleton's recent article in CM Crossroads described it as different from other approaches, but still Agile and suitable for large projects and companies, especially those striving for CMM/CMMI certification.
