Skip to main content

Square peg, round hole - "Agile Unified Process" WTF?

This cracked me up when I read it and I had to double check that the date wasn't April 1st!

"The first production release may take you twelve months to deliver, the second release nine months, and then other releases are delivered every six months. An early focus on deployment issues not only enables you to avoid problems it also allows you to take advantage of your experiences during development"

Priceless! Just about sums it up really. This is an almost unbelievable attempt to 'make trendy' RUP. Like traditional Project Management, people have made entire careers and businesses based around RUP and this looks like a desperate attempt to bring this type of process back into the limelight with a poor attempt at integrating "agile" into it.

Just how far do you go taking ideas and techniques from another framework, try to overlay and fit them into something like RUP before you should just quit and join the other side? Ok I agree that cross pollination of ideas is a good thing but to then call RUP "Agile" just because you borrowed a few ideas from agile frameworks is absolutely incorrect.

As XP'ers slam anyone not following all the tenants of XP so I believe to some degree that follows true for the cornerstones of any process/framwork calling itself "agile" - the chief problems I have with the "Agile Unified Process" is that it just doesn't address the feedback loop issue to allow for changes in goals, working practices and realigment with business strategy.

A great analogy Ken Schwaber made at the Scrum training course was "firing a rocket at the moon". True agile approaches allow you to tweak the course of the rocket at frequent intervals whilst in flight...traditional approaches like RUP line the rocket up at the moon on the ground and hope for the best once the blue touch paper is lit"...And so how AUP (or any process/framework) can dare call itself "agile" with a waterfall of sequential activieties and sprints lasting 12 months is beyond me!

It's great that RUP is evolving, I haven't got a problem with that - I do have a problem with it's moniker of "Agile Unified Process" - no, its RUP vNext or something like that. The nearest this gets to agile is as a relative term to RUP but using the word "Agile" in its name is totally misleading IMHO!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Configuration in .Net 2.0

11-Dec-2007 Update I've updated this post to fix the broken images and replaced them with inline text for the example xml and accompanying C# code. This post has been by far the most hit on this blog and along with the comments about the missing images I thought it was time to update it! Whilst recreating the examples below I zipped up the working source code and xml file and loaded this onto my Project Distributor site - please download it to get a full working custom configuration to play with! Just click on the CustomConfigExampleSource link on the right hand side, then the "Source" link to get the zip. We are in the process of converting our codebase to .Net 2.0. We've used Enterprise Library to great effect so decided that we should continue with this in the form of the Jan 2006 release which targets 2.0 and I've got the job of porting our Logging, Data Access etc wrappers to EntLib 2.0. ...And so far so good - the EntLib docs aren't bad and the migrati...

Walk-Thru: Using Wolfpack to automatically deploy and smoke test your system

First, some history... The advent of NuGet has revolutionised many many aspects of the .Net ecosystem; MyGet, Chocolatey & OctopusDeploy to name a few solutions building upon its success bring even more features to the table. I also spotted that NuGet could solve a problem I was having with my OSS System Monitoring software Wolfpack ; essentially this is a core application framework that uses plugins for extension ( Wolfpack Contrib ) but how to unify, standardise and streamline how these plugins are made available? NuGet to the rescue again - I wrapped the NuGet infrastructure (I deem NuGet to be so ubiquitous and stable that is has transcended into the software "infrastrucuture" hall of fame) with a new OSS project called Sidewinder . Sidewinder allows me to wrap all my little extension and plugins in NuGet packages and deploy them directly from the Wolfpack application - it even allows me to issue a new version of Wolfpack and have Wolfpack update itself, sweet huh...

Announcing FluentGeoApi - a C# wrapper to GeoAPI.com

I'm pleased to make public the fruits of my late nights.... FluentGeoApi ! I previously mentioned that I am working on a private/personal project - well it's got an element of geolocation to it and after a bit of internet research I found GeoAPI.com . In order to interact with GeoAPI I decided to write a fluent style wrapper over the top of it and I've just released v1.0.0.0, a .Net 3.5 C# library to take the pain out of making REST calls and dealing with the GeoJson wire format used by GeoAPI. It's not 100% coverage of the API but I plan on getting there ASAP...however I've implemented Create/Modify/Delete a user entity, Simple and Keyword Search which is enough to release it. If you are working with geolocation data/features in your .Net application I would check out GeoAPI.com - I've been really impressed with what if offers (and if you hit the api < 20,000 times a day it won't cost you a penny!) - hopefully you'll also consider using FluentGe...