By Manoj Vadakkan
Recently I had an opportunity to speak with Alan Atlas, a Certified Scrum Trainer and Certified Scrum Coach who works for Rally Software. In this conversation Alan shares his insight on the state of Agile and Scrum. He also takes a stab at predicting what is to come in the future. This interview also includes some advice both for budding agile consultants and also for organizations that are trying to transform to an agile way of working.
Manoj: Agile has been here for a while; it is everywhere now – small and large organizations, distributed organizations, etc. What’s new in agile? Where is it going?
Alan: One thing I am glad of is that, in a certain sense, there is not a lot that is new. I think we understand it [agile]; I think it works and I really don’t want people messing with it a lot. Ken Schwaber is fond of saying that the whole thing that got us into trouble in the first place was our search for the perfect process. One reason that Scrum is so strong is that it is a process framework, not a process. It gives you all the important stuff and plenty of room to adapt.
It is true that agile does seem to be spreading everywhere. I saw a question in a trainer’s discussion group where someone was asking, "When is it going to be when the only option to do your project is agile? Then you don’t have to say you are doing agile or waterfall, you will just say we are doing a project." I think we will get to a state where that’s [agile] just the way to do things. Students will come out of school knowing agile, and they will know iterative and incremental makes sense; it will be just as logical to them as waterfall was to us when we came out of school. When I came out of school, I thought, what possible other way there could be to do a project? It [waterfall] was so logical. You start by collecting things [requirements]; you go thru this orderly process; what could possibly go wrong? We discovered what it was – what could go wrong.
