In the last four months I've been attending an evening course at Harvard Extension school, called "Project Management of Information Technology" (very interesting course, full of learning!).One of the deliverables of the course was a midterm paper about a topic on Project/Process management in software related domains.
As we are all tuned on WIIFM (What's In It For Me), I chose to write on the Agile/Iterative Software Development Processes and in particular on OpenUP/Basic, which is a minimal, complete and extensible software development process derived from RUP/UP.
Minimal, Complete and Extensible mean that it's self-sufficient, and you can extend it if the project grows...
Here are links to my paper "Iterative Methodologies to Manage Web-Based Software: Focus on OpenUP/Basic":
For this paper, I read and learned a lot about the most well-known Agile processes such as Scrum (see here, and there) and XP, about RUP, OpenUP/Basic (software development process led by the Eclipse Process Framework)
My conclusion:
- don't apply the process "out of the box" but rather adapt it to your constraints.
- Agile methodologies such as Scrum and XP are first and foremost philosophies. These philosophies must be understood to really get the most out of the disciplines (such as daily Scrum meetings, short and timeboxed iterations, Test-Driven Development, think simple and then refactorize when needed, a little bit of Design every day, ...)
- The disciplines can be adopted progressively, but in a certain order, based on your constraints and the goals you want to achieve. but you must understand the philosophy first!
One last word: among the tons of books I had a look at, I found one particularly interesting and with hands on examples: "Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide", by Craig Larman
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