Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

It was a bit imprudent last Monday to announce the continuation of the SCOOP discussion for this week; with the TOOLS conference happening now, with many satellite events such as the Eiffel Design Feast of the past week-end and today’s “New Eiffel Technology Community” workshop, there is not enough time for a full article. Next week might also be problematic. The SCOOP series will resume, but in the meantime I will report on other matters.

As something that can be conveniently typed in while sitting in the back of the TOOLS room during fascinating presentations, here is a bit of publicity for the next round of one-day seminars for industry — “Compact Course” is the official terminology — that I will be teaching at ETH in Zurich next November (one in October), some of them with colleagues. It’s the most extensive session that we have ever done; you can see the full programs and registration information here.

• Software Engineering for Outsourced and Distributed Development, 27 October 2011
  Taught with Peter Kolb and Martin Nordio

• Requirements Engineering, 17 November

• Software Testing and Verification: state of the art, 18 November
  With Carlo Furia and Sebastian Nanz

• Agile Methods: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 23 November

• Concepts and Constructs of Concurrent Computation, 24 November
  With Sebastian Nanz

• Design by Contract, 25 November

The agile methods course is new; its summary reads almost like a little blog article, so here it is.

Agile methods: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Agile methods are wonderful. They’ll give you software in no time at all, turn your customers and users into friends, catch bugs before they catch you, change the world, and boost your love life. Do you believe these claims (even excluding the last two)? It’s really difficult to form an informed opinion, since most of the presentations of eXtreme Programming and other agile practices are intended to promote them (and the consultants to whom they provide a living), not to deliver an objective assessment.

If you are looking for a guru-style initiation to the agile religion, this is not the course for you. What it does is to describe in detail the corpus of techniques covered by the “agile” umbrella (so that you can apply them effectively to your developments), and assess their contribution to software engineering. It is neither “for” nor “against” agile methods but fundamentally descriptive, pedagogical, objective and practical. The truth is that agile methods include some demonstrably good ideas along with some whose benefits are at best dubious. In addition (and this should not be a surprise) they cannot make the fundamental laws of software engineering go away.

Agile methods have now been around for more than a decade, during which many research teams, applying proven methods of experimental science, have performed credible empirical studies of how well the methods really work and how they compare to more traditional software engineering practices. This important body of research results, although not widely known, is critical to managers and developers in industry for deciding whether and how to use agile development. The course surveys these results, emphasizing the ones most directly relevant to practitioners.

A short discussion session will enable participants with experience in agile methods to share their results.

Taking this course will give you a strong understanding of agile development, and a clear view of when, where and how to apply them.

Schedule

Morning session: A presentation of agile methods

• eXtreme Programming, pair programming, Scrum, Test-Driven Development, continuous integration, refactoring, stakeholder involvement, feature-driven development etc.
• The agile lifecycle.
• Variants: lean programming etc.

Afternoon session (I): Assessment of agile methods

• The empirical software engineering literature: review of available studies. Assessment of their value. Principles of empirical software engineering.
• Agile methods under the scrutiny of empirical research: what helps, what harms, and what has no effect? How do agile methods fare against traditional techniques?
• Examples: pair programming versus code reviews; tests versus specifications; iterative development versus “Big Upfront Everything”.

Afternoon session (II): Discussion and conclusion

This final part of the course will present, after a discussion session involving participants with experience in agile methods, a summary of the contribution of agile methods to software engineering.

It will conclude with advice for organizations involved in software development and interested in applying agile methods in their own environment.

Target groups

CIOs; software project leaders; software developers; software testers and QA engineers.