The New Methodology

　　Open Source

　　You may be surprised by this heading. After all open source is a style of software, not so much a process. However there is a definite way of doing things in the open source community, and much of their approach is as applicable to closed source projects as it is to open source. In particular their process is geared to physically distributed teams, which is important because most adaptive processes stress co-located teams.

　　Most open source projects have one or more maintainers. A maintainer is the only person who is allowed to commit a change into the source code repository. However people other than the maintainer may make changes to the code base. The key difference is that other folks need to send their change to the maintainer, who then reviews it and applies it to the code base. Usually these changes are made in the form of patch files which make this process easier. The maintainer thus is responsible for coordinating the patches and maintaining the design cohesion of the software.

　　Different projects handle the maintainer role in different ways. Some have one maintainer for the whole project, some divide into modules and have a maintainer per module, some rotate the maintainer, some have multiple maintainers on the same code, others have a combination of these ideas. Most open source folks are part time, so there is an issue on how well such a team coordinates for a full time project.

　　A particular feature of open source development is that debugging is highly parallelizable. So many people can be involved in debugging. When they find a bug they can send the patch to the maintainer. This is a good role for non-maintainers since most of the time is spent finding the bug. It's also good for folks without strong design skills.

　　The process for open-source isn't well written up as yet. The most famous paper is Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazar, which while an excellent description is also rather brief. Karl Fogel's book on the CVS code repository also contains several good chapters on open-source process that would be interesting even to those who never want to do cvs update.

　　Highsmith's Adaptive Software Development

　　Jim Highsmith has spent many years working with predictive methodologies. He developed them, installed them, taught them, and has concluded that they are profoundly flawed: particularly for modern businesses.

　　His recent book focuses on the adaptive nature of new methodologies, with a particular emphasis on applying ideas that originate in the world of complex adaptive systems (commonly referred to as chaos theory.) It doesn't provide the kind of detailed practices like the XP work does, but it does provide the fundamental groundwork for why adaptive development is important and the consequences at the deeper organizational and management levels.

　　At the heart of ASD are three non-linear, overlapping phases: speculation, collaboration, and learning.

　　Highsmith views planning as a paradox in an adaptive environment, since outcomes are naturally unpredictable. In traditional planning, deviations from plans are mistakes that should be corrected. In an adaptive environment, however, deviations guide us towards the correct solution.

　　In this unpredictable environment you need people to collaborate in a rich way in order to deal with the uncertainty. Management attention is less about telling people what to do, and more about encouraging communication so that people can come up with creative answers themselves.

　　In predictive environments, learning is often discouraged. You lay out things in advance and then follow that design.

　　In an adaptive environment, learning challenges all stakeholders - developers and their customers - to examine their assumptions and to use the results of each development cycle to adapt the next.
-- [Highsmith]
As such learning is a continuous and important feature, one that assumes that plans and designs must change as development proceeds.

　　The overriding, powerful, indivisible, predominant benefit of the Adaptive Development Life Cycle is that it forces us to confront the mental models that are at the root of our self-delusion. It forces us to more realistically estimate our ability.
-- [Highsmith]
With this emphasis, Highsmith's work focuses directly on to foster the hard parts of adaptive development, in particular how to foster collaboration and learning within the project. As such his book helps provide ideas to foster these "soft" areas which makes a nice complement to the grounded practice based approaches such as XP, FDD, and Crystal.

　　Scrum

　　Scrum has been around for a while in object-oriented circles, although I'll confess I'm not too au fait with its history or development. Again it focuses on the fact that defined and repeatable processes only work for tackling defined and repeatable problems with defined and repeatable people in defined and repeatable environments.

　　Scrum divides a project into iterations (which they call sprints) of 30 days. Before you begin a sprint you define the functionality required for that sprint and then leave the team to deliver it. The point is to stabilize the requirements during the sprint.

　　However management does not disengage during the sprint. Every day the team holds a short (fifteen minute) meeting, called a scrum, where the team runs through what it will do in the next day. In particular they surface to the management blocks: impediments to progress that are getting in the way that management needs to resolve. They also report on what's been done so management gets a daily update of where the project is.

　　Scrum literature focuses mainly on the iterative planning and tracking process. It's very close to the other agiles in many respects and should work well with the coding practices from XP.

　　After a long time without a book, finally Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle have written the first scrum book. Ken Schwaber also hosts controlChaos.com[missing reference] which is probably the best overview of SCRUM. Jeff Sutherland has always has an active web site on object technology issues and includes a section on SCRUM. There's also a good overview of Scrum practices in the PLoPD 4 book. Scrum has a yahoo discussion list.