Agile on Software Engineering Thoughts

The Confusion Between Scrum and Agile

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 13:44:19 +0100

More and more I am reading about, and experiencing, organisations who have adopted “Scrum” as their process, but are complaining that they aren’t achieving any of the benefits that they expected from “going agile”. This often manifests itself in broad claims that agile is a failure as a methodology.

I’ve come to believe that there is a fundamental misunderstanding around what agile actually is, how it is supposed to help, and in particular how it relates to Scrum. In this post I want to try to address this confusion.

Continuous Collaboration

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 09:22:10 +0100

The age of teams collaborating by huddling around a whiteboard in a meeting room inside some corporate office is dead. The future of teams is continuous collaboration. In this post I will explore what this is, how it works, and why meeting rooms and whiteboards should be consigned to the scrapheap of failed team collaboration approaches.

(Note: this is not to say that there isn’t sometimes value in meeting rooms and whiteboards for knowledge dissemination and other group activities, just not collaboration.)

Incremental Architecture

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 19:47:54 +0000

I have been having some interesting discussions with colleagues around evolving architecture and adding new requirements in an agile environment. The discussion raised some interesting points that I felt worthy of a blog post exploration.

Background

Imagine a simple system comprised of two main components:

Component A is the main component containing the key business logic. In order for it to do its job it needs to interact with component X. Mostly it needs to retrieve activity status from X, but it can also initiate a new activity from time to time.
Component X is a legacy system outside of our control. It has a number of peculiarities that make it challenging to integrate with. These include:
- Legacy format API payloads that aren’t mapped to a domain model
- Payloads that might not always be backwards compatible
- Release cadences that aren’t related to those of component A
- Periods of scheduled non-availability where some requests cannot be accepted and must be retried later
- Performance constraints requiring some throttling of requests
- High latency on some operations

Given the challenges of interfacing with component X, the team building the integration made a sensible decision and decided to keep all the complexity outside of the main component. Instead they added a new microservice, Component B. This component implements an adapter and anti-corruption layer that deals with, and abstracts away, all the eccentricities of X.