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Review
of SDLC 3.0: Beyond a Tacit Understanding of Agile
performed by Scott Ambler, Chief Methodologist
Agile/Lean, IBM Rational
For
immediate release:
Ottawa,
Canada;
Reviews are
starting to come in for the recently released book
titled SDLC 3.0: Beyond a Tacit Understanding of
Agile by Mark Kennaley. This book attempts to
de-mystify and explain in easy to understand terms what
it means to be Agile, a term that is becoming mainstream
within the IT Industry. It also makes a very
strong and compelling case for the abandonment of
"named" methods in favor of integrating past
experience and knowledge into a system of
patterns. According to Mark Kennaley, President and Principal
Consultant at Fourth Medium, "the division created
by methodology isolation is the single most wasteful
issue afflicting Enterprise IT today. Reducing
this is consistent with Lean Thinking principles at a
time when "more-for-less" is the new
norm."
Below is the
first review of SDLC 3.0, performed by Scott Ambler of
IBM, which has now been incorporated as the Foreword of
the book. Other reviews will be posted as they
come in over the next few months.
For more information, contact us at info@fourth-medium.com
.
Foreword: by Scott Ambler
Being a firm believer in measured value, I thought I
would start with a quick discussion of the two metrics
that indicate the value of a book to me. The first one
is how much did I mark up the book as I was reading it
and the second is how many books or articles did the
book reference that I sought out afterwards. I treat my
books harshly, highlighting important ideas and writing
my observations and thoughts in the margins as I read,
and my copy of SDLC
3.0 is
marked up severely. As for the second metric, as I was
writing this a shipment from Amazon arrived with seven
books which I ordered after this book piqued my interest
in them.
The most important question that I can attempt to
answer in this foreword is what I believe you will get
out of reading this book. First and foremost, this book
presents a realistic and reasoned view of agile software
delivery. Note how I use the term delivery and not just
development – this book goes far beyond the software
development life cycle to consider the full delivery
life cycle. In fact, it goes further to consider how to
apply agile and lean concepts at the enterprise level;
more on this in a minute. The book forgoes the marketing
rhetoric that is all too common in the mainstream agile
community and instead focuses on what works in practice
and more importantly explains why it does so through the
application of systems theory. Don’t worry –
although Mark does present a few relatively complex
mathematical explanations for why agile techniques work
the way they do, he walks the reader through the
explanations in a coherent and understandable manner.
The second strength of this book is its solid
foundation in IT history. Time and again I see
practitioners waste months, and sometimes years, as they
relearn lessons from the past. In chapter 2 Mark
presents a graph overviewing the historical roots of
today’s methodologies and in chapter 3 he presents the
history of systems control theory. Both of these graphs,
and more importantly the discussions around them, will
help to give you the background that you need to work
your way through the propaganda of the process
prosthelytizers among us. These two chapters alone will
be an eye opener for the majority of agile developers
today.
Mark applies his deep understanding of methodologies,
systems control theory, and human behavior throughout
the book. Page after page he presents
strategies from a wide variety of sources, not just the
current process fashion, and explains why and in what
circumstances they work. His argument that systems
theory provides the underlying explanation for why agile
and lean strategies are effective is a strong one,
providing IT practitioners a path to move away from
superstition and folklore to actual understanding.
Mark argues coherently for what he calls SDLC 3.0, a
tailored hybrid of strategies taken from lean, agile,
and the unified process. Each of these process camps
have their adherents, people who often point out the
weaknesses of other process religions without
recognizing their strengths. SDLC 3.0 doesn’t make
that mistake, but instead adopts ideas from each camp
and weaves them into a stronger and more coherent whole.
The book’s name is apt, it truly does represent a
third category of software process (the first one being
waterfall/serial development and the second iterative
and incremental development).
The final strength of this book is the focus on
enterprise-level processes. It’s very rare to see
coherent discussions of project-level issues and
enterprise-level issues in the same book, yet SDLC 3.0
pulls it off. Mark combines ideas from lean software
development, Information Technology Infrastructure
Library (ITIL), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) to
describe how to be truly agile across your entire IT
department, not just within the scope of a single
project team. This enterprise view requires a more
holistic view, and dare I say a more mature one, than
what we typically see in the mainstream agile community
today. If you’re trying to roll out agile across your
entire IT department, or at least a large portion of it,
then I suspect this book will be a valuable resource.
The bottom line is that it isn’t very often that a
software process book comes along that truly impresses
me, and SDLC 3.0 is one of the few that has. To put
things in perspective, other such books include Extreme
Programming Explained by Kent
Beck, Lean
Software Development by the
Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Introduction
to the Rational Unified Process by
Philippe Kruchten, and Organizational
Patterns of Agile Software Development by
Jim Coplien and Neil Harrison. So yes, I highly
recommend that you read this book.
Scott W. Ambler Chief Methodologist/Agile, IBM
Rational
Creator, Agile Modeling and Enterprise Unified
Process
March 2010
About
Fourth Medium Consulting Inc.
Fourth
Medium Consulting Inc. is an IT Management Consultancy
focused on applying Lean principles
and practices to IT organizational transformation.
Our primary
focus is the application of Lean IT Engineering to
enable delivery of more value for less, and to address
known problems of scalability with older Agile
approaches. This is enacted through recent
innovations in collaborative software engineering
infrastructure termed Application Lifecycle Management,
with examples being technologies like IBM Rational Team
Concert and the Jazz Platform.
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