BA Rocks!

To paraphrase a Zoolander quote, Agile is “so hot right now”. When you ask business areas and IT managers what they are interested in, they respond that they want to be more agile in order to adapt in a changing environment. What is it that everyone wants to be agile? Agile is not new, but it has had a resurgence of late and this is probably due to the fact that in a fast paced world where change is a constant, the word agile seems reassuring and positive, but are we all talking about the same thing?

I asked a BA user group meeting recently what they thought agile meant and they proposed it was about “flexibility”, “adaptability”, “iterations”, “prototyping”,”light weight documentation”, “adapting to change” and “saving time and money”.

There are many Agile Methodologies (AM) including Extreme programming (XP), Feature Driven Development (FDD) and Scrum. Each has its basis in the engineering or project management disciplines and lean more towards one or the other.

XP has its basis from the engineering discipline and focuses on the critical activities required to build the software and requires with developers to be directly involved with project stakeholders who need to actively participate in the process. Scrum tends to come from more a project management focus and it was originally intended for management of software development projects but is now used as a way to run software teams and break the development into sprint cycles to development increments of the software. FDD sits some where between the two and includes explicit modelling activities that is driven from a client valued functionality (feature) perspective. The common themes and threads across all three seem to be user orientation, need for user involvement and the need to resolve uncertainty regarding requirements.

What these AMs have in common is that these agile methods can help streamline your modelling and documentation efforts as they are an enabling technique for evolutionary development. There is a danger that  some may use “agile” as an excuse to having no requirements or no documentation and to just go ahead an build whatever they want without thought to the user or system purpose. This is not in the true spirit of agile.

Agile has become more a philosophy rather than a methodology in the strict sense of the word and that may explain why agile means different things to different people. So whilst it is not easy to tell what agile is, agile is now what we all should subscribe to be.