Semantic Werks

I just watched an excellent presentation by David Anderson at the Agile 08 conference. He talked about moving agile to more complex, enterprise-scale projects, and how the current agile practices work.

My big take-away was his characterization of requirements as ‘perishable’. In his view, unmet requirements are like unsold inventory, essentially liabilities until they can be turned into working systems. He borrows from the just-in-time philosophy of Lean manufacturing to emphasize how unsatisfied requirements ought to be taken off the shelf and implemented as soon as possible.

In his view, future software/system architecture decisions will be much higher-level, business-value decisions. He mentioned software product lines as an example: the architect is someone who can separate product variability and encapsulate common behaviour, rather than over-specifying lower-level designs. There will be an increased need for ‘customer intimacy’ to generate unique systems that capture a core competency or competitive advantage.

There’s a lot more in this talk, including some interesting ideas on community evolution, so it’s well worth the time to watch.