Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

ACM is offering this coming Wednesday a one-hour webinar entitled Agile Methods: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly. It will air on February 18 at 1 PM New York time (10 AM West Coast, 18 London, 19 Paris, see here for more cities). The event is free and the registration link is here.

The presentation is based on my recent book with an almost identical title [1]. It will be a general discussion of agile methods, analyzing both their impressive contributions to software engineering and their excesses, some of them truly damaging. It is often hard to separate the beneficial from the indifferent and the plain harmful, because most of the existing presentations are of the hagiographical kind, gushing in admiration of the sacred word. A bit of critical distance does not hurt.

As you can see from the Amazon page, the first readers (apart from a few dissenters, not a surprise for such a charged topic) have relished this unprejudiced, no-nonsense approach to the presentation of agile methods.

Another characteristic of the standard agile literature is that it exaggerates the contrast with classic software engineering. This slightly adolescent attitude is not helpful; in reality, many of the best agile ideas are the direct continuation of the best classic ideas, even when they correct or adapt them, a normal phenomenon in technology evolution. In the book I tried to re-place agile ideas in this long-term context, and the same spirit will also guide the webinar. Ideological debates are of little interest to software practitioners; what they need to know is what works and what does not.

References

[1] Bertrand Meyer, Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly, Springer, 2014, see Amazon page here, publisher’s page here and my own book page here.

Actually not that new: this paper [1] was published in August of last year. It is part of Christian Estler’s work for this PhD thesis, defended a few weeks ago, and was pursued in collaboration with Martin Nordio and Carlo Furia. It received the best paper award at the International Conference on Global Software Engineering; in fact this was the third time in a row that this group received the ICGSE award, so it must have learned a few things about collaborative development.

The topic is an issue that affects almost all software teams: how to make sure that people are aware of each other’s changes to a shared software base, in particular to avoid the dreaded case of a merge conflict: you and I are working on the same piece of code, but we find out too late, and we have to undergo the painful process of reconciling our conflicting changes.

The paper builds once again on the experience of our long-running “Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering” course project, where students from geographically spread universities collaborate on a software development [2]. It relies on data from 105 student developers making up twelve development teams located in different countries.

The usual reservations about using data from students apply, but the project is substantial and the conditions not entirely different from those of an industrial development.

The study measured the frequency and impact of merge conflicts, the effect of insufficient awareness (no one told me that you are working on the same module that I am currently modifying) and the consequences for the project: timeliness, developer morale, productivity.

Among the results: distribution does not matter that much (people are not necessarily better informed about their local co-workers’ developments than about remote collaborators); lack of awareness occurs more often than merge conflicts, and causes more damage.

References

[1] H-Christian Estler, Martin Nordio, Carlo A. Furia and Bertrand Meyer: Awareness and Merge Conflicts in Distributed Software Development, in proceedings of ICGSE 2014, 9th International Conference on Global Software Engineering, Shanghai, 18-21 August 2014, IEEE Computer Society Press (best paper award), see here.

[2] Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering course and project, see here. (The text mentions “DOSE 2013” but the concepts remains applicable and it will be updated.)