Pols Consulting

Martin Fowler has blogged the idea of a Strangler Application based the work Chris Stevenson and I presented in our An Agile Approach to A Lagacy System paper.

Here are some interesting comments about our approach:

… Much of my career has involved rewrites of critical systems. You would think such a thing as easy – just make the new one do what the old one did. Yet they are always much more complex than they seem, and overflowing with risk. The big cut-over date looms, the pressure is on. While new features (there are always new features) are liked, old stuff has to remain. Even old bugs often need to be added to the rewritten system.

An alternative route is to gradually create a new system around the edges of the old, letting it grow slowly over several years until the old system is strangled.

The most important reason to consider a strangler application over a cut-over rewrite is reduced risk. A strangler can give value steadily and the frequent releases allow you to monitor its progress more carefully…

Andy Hunt had an interesting blog entry referencing an New York Times article on outsourcing.

The article describes how you can only outsource projects which are easily managed at a distance. While obvious, lots of people need to read it! They predict development will move back to the USA, when companies realise that’s its faster and cheaper to develop software locally.

Bladelogic’s chief technology officer, Vijay Manwani, born and educated in India, predicts that once the “hype cycle” about Indian outsourcing runs its course, projects will come back to the United States “when people find that their productivity goals have not been met.”

Innovative business processes result from “an understanding of the business that happens when people get into a room and talk to each other,” Mr. Pradhan said. “That is very difficult to outsource.”

I hope more people start publishing stories like this…

Sadly you have to register (it’s free) to be able read it.

I’m particularly fond of this definition of Agile Software from the Menlo Institute.

It really focuses your mind as a developer. How many of us can put our hand on our heart and say we are agile if this was the only definition?

Before you can build a team that rocks, you must first become agile. If you don’t already know what an Agile team is, let me help:

An Agile software development team can add features in any order and can release a working version of the product at any iteration.

Chris Matts and I have been playing around with the concepts of using business value to help focus development teams on what is important to the business. It’s still draft, put out for peer review. We hope to publish it somewhere interesting soon!

BusinessValueDrivenDevelopment (PDF)