This week Ivar Jacobson gave a talk at the Microsoft Regional Architect Forum in Zurich. Ivar Jacobson is one of the founders of UML, RUP and use cases. In his talk "Getting Good Software, Quickly and at Low Cost" he spoke about his practiced-based approach to software development. At the beginning he mentioned the main problems of software processes. According to him every process tries to be complete, process documentation is never read and the way how people live the process is soon out of sync with the original process definition. He then suggested a more practice oriented approach for finding the right process. He described what a practice is and how practices can be composed to build custom processes.
The ideas he talked about made a lot of sense to me. I was very surprised by the lightweightness of his approach. As an example he proposed to document a practice by a set of index cards on which you only describe the essentials of the practice.
He also talked about agile software development. For him Agile is "a box" of the good stuff that existed since many years with some social additions. He sees SCRUM as a practice to project management. I always saw SCRUM as a process. But I think his right. It's a good way to do project management in the field of software development. But with SCRUM alone you don't deliver good software. To be successful you'll need good engineering practices, testing practices and other practices for capturing requirements or releasing software. I focused very much on SCRUM for some time now. Together with my fellows we put a lot of effort in adopting SCRUM for the projects we where involved and also for the company wide adoption of SCRUM. Maybe its time for me, to address some other things. Back to good old engineering stuff. There are a lot of practices to explore over at Ivar Jacobson International and also from the Eclipse Process Framework.
