Interview: Scott Ambler On Agile’s Present and Future

Posted by Abel Avram on Dec 02, 2008

Sections

Process & Practices,

Architecture & Design,

Enterprise Architecture

Topics

Agile in the Enterprise ,

Agile ,

Modeling ,

Agile Techniques

Tags

Large Projects ,

Distributed Teams

In this interview, InfoQ’s Chief Editor, Floyd Marinescu, interviewed Scott Ambler, Practice Lead for Agile Development at IBM, on the current status of the Agile community and practices having a look at the perspective of the Agile’s future.

Watch: Scott Ambler On Agile’s Present and Future (38 min.)

After introducing himself, Scott is invited to speak about his perception of the current Agile status. Scott remarks that most organizations are doing Agile projects. Some are even doing Test-Driven Development (TDD) and most agilistas are doing requirements or architecture modeling. An early conclusion: “Agile is here to stay”, according to Scott.

One subject touched in this interview was Agile in large distributed teams. While acknowledging that Agile has best results in small collocated teams, Scott considers that Agile is also suited for large distributed teams. The success rate is lower for such teams, but it is still a high number at about 60%.

After speaking about Rational Team Concept, an Eclipse IDE for distributed teams, Scott presented his view on closing the gap between business and IT departments. He agrees that the gap is going to be narrower, but he does not think the IT department is going to disappear any time soon.

After addressing the issue of modeling, its role and ways to be done by Agile teams, Scott offers a peak preview on the future of Agile as he sees it. He considers Agile as a step forward in software development, but we need to move to high-quality enterprise development.

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