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New Who uses Carnegie Mellon as the authority on Agile?
I metnioned Agile development recently, and someone quoted back to me what "true clean-room Agile Methodology" would be, according to Carnegie Mellon. I didn't argue the point, but who quotes Carnegie Mellon, the source of CMMI, as an authority on what Agile really means? And what did he think he meant by "clean-room Agile"?
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Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
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New CMMI has claimed agile as its own
and in fact SEI says that following agile practices will get you to level III.

I personally think the entire CMMI thing is hooey.



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[link|http://www.objectiveclips.com|Artificial Intelligence]

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New How would that work?
and in fact SEI says that following agile practices will get you to level III.
How can they classify agile as "repeatable", much less "defined"? The whole theory of agile is that you never know when you start a project what it's going to look like at the end. And how can you say one process takes you to level 3, but then you have to completely change your process for the next step? WTF?!
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Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
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New Is your google finger broken?
[link|http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/articles/paulk/xp-from-a-cmm-perspective.html|http://www.sei.cmu.e...-perspective.html]

[link|http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/04.reports/04tn036.html|http://www.sei.cmu.e...orts/04tn036.html]

[link|http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/xp_and_cmm.htm|http://www.xprogramm...ag/xp_and_cmm.htm]



[link|http://www.blackbagops.net|Black Bag Operations Log]

[link|http://www.objectiveclips.com|Artificial Intelligence]

[link|http://www.badpage.info/seaside/html|Scrutinizer]
New The Ron Jeffries page makes more sense
Not surprising, as it's his methodology.
My assessment overall is that XP has some characteristics in common with the higher SEI levels, up to and including level 5. However, I would not assert that an XP team is a level 5 team. It takes a lot more documentation and "proving" going on in CMM than we recommend for XP. XP is in some ways a "vertical" slice through the SEI levels 2 through 5.
That's how I saw it. I haven't read the CM paper yet,[1] but to say that agile can take you to Level 3 doesn't make any sense to me.


[1] It hung my browser first time I tried to download it. If I see anything to contradict my impression based on what you said I'll update this.

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[edit]

That didn't take long.
XP\ufffds critical underlying assumption is that developers can obviate the traditional high cost of change using technologies such as objects, patterns, and relational databases, resulting in a highly dynamic XP process.
Completely wrong. The critical underlying assumption is that the most efficient way to deal with inevitable change is to write the smallest, most useful thing you can, complete it before the requirements change, then write the next most useful thing you can. Use of objects, patterns and RDBMSs are the tactics they have found most useful, but they are not the core concept of XP.

And another:
Refactoring: Restructure the system without changing its behavior to remove duplication, improve communication, simplify, or add flexibility.
No. You never refactor to add flexibility. Adding something is not refactoring. If you're adding the ability to do another thing in addition to what it already does, you're adding functionality.
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Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
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Expand Edited by drewk Aug. 15, 2006, 01:40:02 PM EDT
Expand Edited by drewk Aug. 15, 2006, 01:42:35 PM EDT
New Refactoring and flexibility.
I think what he might mean about flexibility is to do with going forward. Adding a feature to a piece of code can easily add cruft. Refactoring removes the cruft, replacing it with a more flexible piece of code that, whilst not intended to add functionality, gives room to more easily add functionality at a later time. Which might be 10 minutes hence, but still, that's still a later step.

I've tried to do XP before; it's hard and tiring. Oh, you can get a lot done, true, but you have to work at it. And you have to work at staying in the process. The most obviously difficult part is matching suitable programmers for pair programming.

Wade.
"Insert crowbar. Apply force."
New Re: Who uses Carnegie Mellon as the authority on Agile?
Though I would certainly not quote Carnegie Mellon or anyone associated with CMMI as being authoritative when it comes to Agile Methodologies, there *is* a move on CMMI's side to "play better with others," including Agile.

The real question is whether it's actually possible. I'm still forming an opinion on this, but given that I'm dealing with CMMI and that I have some background in the Agile Methodologies, I can safely say that there's more compatibility than you would normally think. Part of the problem is really understanding CMMI and understanding what Agile means.

Unfortunately, CMMI is typically misunderstood because it's rarely implemented properly (which is mostly its own fault...I'm certainly not trying to defend CMMI). When viewed from the perspective of defining a process that has proof it was followed (generating those artifacts), it becomes less of a demon and more of a plan waiting for a good tool (or tools) to solve.

Of course, on the Agile side, there's also a lot of misunderstanding. For example, XP is assumed to be synonomous with Agile, when it's just one of several published Agile Methodologies (of course, it's also the most popular, so there's some expectation of that). In fact, Agility is more an approach to methodologies than any specific practice (though there are some that are implied, such as Iterations). See the Agile Alliance for lots of details (www.agilealliance.com).

As for the "clean-room Agile" reference: I expect they're referring to the creation of an Agile process that is CMMI-compliant (clean-room referring to not bothering to leverage existing Agile Methodologies like XP).

Fundamentally, I don't believe they are compatible in the sense that CMMI requires "proof" that you followed the plan. Agility doesn't require proof. The "proof" is the delivered application, nothing more. There's a fundamental disconnect. However, the question of whether you can do both is still there; not from a philosophical perspective, but from a physical process perspective. I think the answer is that you can (but, it won't be XP), but it's not trivial (and requires a significant amount of tool support).

Dan
My Blog: dshellman.blogspot.com
New I'm sorry, we were having a religious war here
What are you doing coming back all thoughtful and reasonable?
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Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link|http://DocHope.com|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats].
[link|http://DocHope.com|http://DocHope.com]
New Re: I'm sorry, we were having a religious war here
My apologies: Down with CMMI! It has horns! Down with Agility...there's no discipline, and when we were kids, we had to walk up hill both ways, and we LIKED it!

It's almost as bad as a religious war as .NET and Java (or, around here, Perl, Smalltalk, and Objective C). Be careful, I might do something in your general direction.

Dan
My Blog: dshellman.blogspot.com
     Who uses Carnegie Mellon as the authority on Agile? - (drewk) - (8)
         CMMI has claimed agile as its own - (tuberculosis) - (4)
             How would that work? - (drewk) - (3)
                 Is your google finger broken? - (tuberculosis) - (2)
                     The Ron Jeffries page makes more sense - (drewk) - (1)
                         Refactoring and flexibility. - (static)
         Re: Who uses Carnegie Mellon as the authority on Agile? - (dshellman) - (2)
             I'm sorry, we were having a religious war here - (drewk) - (1)
                 Re: I'm sorry, we were having a religious war here - (dshellman)

My other car isn't worth talking about.
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