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Key Speakers

Barry Boehm
Center for Software Engineering
University of Southern California

AGILE METHODS AND CMM'S: OIL AND WATER?

Agile methods (Extreme Programming, Crystal, Scrum, Adaptive Software Development, et al.) are often cited as a rejection of the heavyweight processes resulting from full compliance with software maturity models. Advocates of process maturity often cite agile methods as just excuses for hackers to avoid thinking and planning before committing to code. This session will try to clarify the nature of agile methods and their relationship to such maturity models as the Software CMM and the CMMI.

Barry Boehm will begin with a comparative analysis of experiences to date with agile methods and maturity models, a discussion of their critical success factors, and a presentation of a framework for deciding whether agile methods, plan-driven methods, or combinations of both are the best fit for a given project situation. A summary of the analysis and framework is in the January 2002 issue of IEEE Computer.


Tom DeMarco
The Atlantic Systems Guild Inc.

SECRETS OF THE AGILE ORGANIZATION

We live in an age of acceleration. Whatever the formula was for business success a few years ago, it won't work today. Today there needs to be more and more work crammed into less and less time. There are fewer people doing more and doing it faster in less space with less support and with tighter tolerances and higher quality requirements than ever before. So we have spent the last decade becoming ever more efficient. Now enter the need for change. In the super-accelerated corporation, meaningful change of direction is almost impossible. The very improvements that the we made to go faster and cheaper have undermined our capacity to make any other kind of change. An organization that can accelerate but not change direction is like a car that can speed up but not steer.
In the short run it makes lots of progress in whatever direction it happened to be going. In the long run it's just another road wreck.