Agile : Real World Examples

[zakshurst]

Hi

I am looking fro some real world examples of Agile project in particular MSF 4.0 for development methodology combined with Scrums for management.

Background

Currently our company uses the water fall model, but new developments I believe are better suited to Agile. To this end I am trailing out Agile on a new project. The project is for a data centric application, with a multi deployment model. It is written VS2008 Vb.Net we are already design it to be test driven and starting to use NUNIT. I know Team system is supposed natural option but I find it difficult to justify based on the fact that most Open source seems to do a better job if less integrated and they have moved some functions from VS2008 into VSTS and now want us to pay for it. I can’t complain too much as VS2008 is fantastic tool

Anyway we are struggling with documentation , types required and level of detail required to keep the process streamline but also repeatable/ supportable. When looking there are hundreds if not thousands of articles on Agile and loads of templates, but I can’t find any real world examples,
• This is after 2 years of looking , lately the team has made it real priority to find examples but to no avail.
• being a Microsoft partner we have asked Microsoft directly but they can’t pin point any
• We have downloaded various trial software with supposed examples , but it is always templates.
• We have bought books that have said they have examples. I have hassled the authors.

I was hoping that end to end examples would be available, groups/people say they are working on them but it appears that they have been working on them for years. I thought competitions were held for best developments and I could get the examples from them.

I understand that you make agile your own and you have to tailor it to suit your needs, so examples are not useful but I need to see
- types and level of details that go into docs
- how information cascades from requiremenet,UAC, design to unit tests code etc.
- how you provide traceability
- how you provide auditable solutions, that show you have to external auditors how review and approval was performed.

For example I really hate documentation use of modelling diagrams and class digrams, properly source code is my aim but what should it look like. I really don’t want to repeat the mistakes and pitfalls others fall in. ( I am really afraid we will fail not because of Agile but because we don’t have a complete project, sceptics reviewing it will find too many holes. )

I hope this makes sense.

[sarehu]

This might be the most depressing post I have read on this forum. I have to admit maybe you live in a different software development world than I live in. For example, the notion of "auditable solutions" and external auditing is something that I just don't deal with. Come to think of it, I have no idea what a "solution" is. And there seem to be multiple definitions of auditing, looking at Wikipedia, so I don't know which you are referring to.

What is really scary is the terminology and concepts I see that I have never heard of before. It is like you come from another planet:

* MSF 4.0
* a multi deployment model
* VSTS
* types required
* level of detail required to keep the process streamline but also repeatable/ supportable
* templates
* types and level of details that go into docs
* UAC
* traceability

I have found some of these defined very easily with some Googling, but for others that is not the case.

What is a 'type'? I take it you aren't referring to a type as seen in programming languages. And what's a 'template'? What does it mean for the process to be repeatable or supportable? (What does it mean to "support the process" or "repeat the process"?) Does UAC mean something different than User Account Control? Because I don't see what that has to do with anything. Do you mean traceability in the sense described here?

For example I really hate documentation use of modelling diagrams and class digrams, properly source code is my aim but what should it look like.

I'm confused by this. Is this sentence asking what the source code should look like?

Also, I'm wondering why you don't already know how much detail you want to put into documentation.

And how many people are working on the particular project you want to do this for?

how you provide auditable solutions, that show you have to external auditors how review and approval was performed.

This isn't a grammatically correct sentence. In fact, it's rather incomprehensible. It's hard to guess your meaning since I don't know what "review and approval" entails.

At the company or business unit I work at, our software development process is like this:

- Distributed source control.
- Milestones or releases every 2-4 weeks, for the sake of a stable revision off of which future revisions can be made.
- All code gets reviewed before going into a 'main' branch.
- Use tests to protect against your stupidity and also to describe the expected behavior of the code.

And that's all. I'm not sure what the big fuss is about.