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Posted by Shane Hastie on Apr 03, 2009
At the Software Education SDC conference in Melbourne, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand, last week, Ivar Jacobson, author of the original work on Use Cases, the Unified Modeling Language and the Rational Unified Process, said that Agile development needs to “Get Smart”.
He stated that the information technology industry is very fashion conscious, having a tendency to latch onto silver bullets, and listed the following examples:
All have good elements – but none is what we need, what we need to do is to Work Smarter. He says “Being Smart is an evolution of being Agile”:
According to Jacobson “Smart is Agile++”. He continued to give examples of a number of smart (and unsmart) practices and approaches he has recognized over the years. Some of the Smart and Unsmart practices he identified are:
The key element to becoming Smart is to focus on the people, as Jacobson says, and “it all comes down to you”.
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It sounds to be the same presentation Ivar Jacobson did at Devoxx 08. Can anyone confirm ?
Is it me, or are the links a little fouled up?
I hate to sound critical of someone of Ivar's stature in our industry, but I fail to see how any of the Unsmart/Smart examples are Agile++. They all look like standard Agile to me.
Am I missing something?
Yes the links are fouled up - we'll get right on them.
+1
Agreed - all the smart/unsmart points look just like my understanding of Agile
So, are we missing something? It is hard to dismiss someone like Ivar, at the same time, I agree with this sentiment.
Like others, I'm not seeing what else Jacobsen is suggesting. Even after skimming the recent articles on his blog, it's not clear to me. Is it possible he hasn't seen any good Agile teams in action?
I've read things from a number of yesteryear's luminaries that make me suspect that they're opining on the Agile movement mainly from what they hear and read, rather than from the kind of direct experience that informed their earlier work.
I suspect I missed some of the essence of Ivar's message in my summary of his talk. He made a strong point that much of what he is saying is indeed Agile as it is intended to be, but that he sees a lot of organisations trying to implement Agile by rote, thus repeating the mistakes of the past.
Agile isn't a silver bullet and he was encouraging his audience (in the Wellington conference mainly government and large company business analysts and project managers) to think carefully about the people factors and not expect to get the benefits by somehow applying a methodology recipe out of someone's book.
Agree, I think Shane has uncovered the motivation behind Ivar's talk...
What's most interesting is that he is pretty much saying plainly and clearly "Waterfall is terrible".
I've been part of an organization that has been trying for several years to pass off waterfall as RUP, these statements coming from Jacobson will really help me make my own case.
If that's the case how is Ivar any different than James Shore or any one else talking about bad/mediocre agile implementations in recent months?
I think the point Ivar talked is not about Agile at all, it's about people. "Focus on people" is the smart way.
I've just blogged about this in my blog: believerdiary.blogspot.com/2009/04/agile-or-jus...
Besides what I've blogged I'd like to add that I think the way Ivar used for expressing that Agile is not a silver bullet is maybe the wrong one, as people could easily get the message that "Agile is not smart".
Alec Sharp (one of the conference speakers) blogged about the same talk here alecsharp.com/
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