Agile Service Development?
A few months ago I really started to dig into to agile software development methodologies. Services Engineering were moving down this route and I thought it would be good to be at least fluent in the terminology. Most of my development experience and code (which thankfully for everyone is no doubt been retired :-) was using a very traditional waterfall methodology, even if we called it something else it basically was requirements up front then after a period of time (which ranged from 6months to 1year) a test cycle (normally compressed because the development overran) then customer got to see a result. Very hit or miss.
Services Engineering now is in high gear with scrum as our agile methodology. We are working on 30 day iterations or sprints and using all the trappings such as scrum meetings, sprint reviews and carefully managing backlogs. Below is a good graphic I borrowed from Wikipedia that describes the process very well.
So far we have used scrum on a handful of projects. The results have really been truly astounding. I'm now addicted to sprint reviews, its almost like Christmas every 30 days. The progress we are seeing has been fantastic and what's more our customers/constituents like the more "show and tell" approach where they get to see, help correct requirements/course mid flight. I remember clearly with the waterfall style the heated arguments about scope creep and requirements change. Scrum takes this in its stride and assumes this will be the case.
6 months in and we are really reaping the benefits for software developments.
Now comes the punch-line. When I look at the way we and to be honest most of the industry define/build support services its basically a waterfall approach. Through Sun's interaction with the Services Research and Innovation Initiative (http://thesri.org) we have come across several organizations pushing these boundaries.
One of my favorite concepts was presented by Walter Ganz from the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering. This was the idea of servicescape. Where services could be built, tested and iterated within a virtual world. The best link I could find for this is at www.rhsmith.umd.edu/ces/frontiers/presentations2007/Fisk.pdf checkout the servlab examples. This is concept I'm keen to embrace for Sun Services and will be looking for some opportunities in the coming months to try out this approach. Keep an eye on Kevin Ellis' blog as we take this journey... should be a fun ride :-)
Technorati Tags: Service Science
