Is Software Evolution really Effective?

Presentation 30'

Abstract

Agile Methods propose software evolution and emergent design techniques as the key elements needed to effectively manage software development: agile processes are built on incremental development, continuous delivery, refactoring/emergent design. Nevertheless the number of mature agile teams not improving their productivity even when continuously applying and improving evolutionary practices is increasing.

Francesco's thesis is that evolution and emergency of design are properties we can observe but they are not generative principles: hence considering evolution and emergent design techniques as being the key factors of software production is misleading. Evolution and emergent design techniques are results of the internal construction strategy each developer applies when making each and every programming decision. This strategy can favour or prevent effective evolution: for sure if the developer is not aware of the existance of such a strategy, evolutionary development certainly leads to failure.

Francesco began to study the effectiveness of evolution in software development in 2005 at XPLabs. The research was initially aimed at providing an explanation for biased results on a number of apparently "well-done" projects. XPLabs' teams maintained process and product metrics on a pomodoro basis, thus favoring the study of the team production function for those projects. Francesco's investigation continued on through the Anti-IF Campaign, which allowed him to study the code of all its supporters. Last but not least he gathered more data related to digital product development in etherogenous fields working as the Head of the Anti-IF Task Force, mentoring and coaching external teams in Europe.

In order to learn how to distinguish effective evolution and practice of emergent design techniques Francesco proposes a different way of reading and applying the ROI metric using real product development data. This will help teams to identify when dysfunctional evolutionary development happens, even when they successfully applies incremental development, continuous delivery, refactoring, tdd and other related evolutionary/emergent practices.

Speaker

Francesco Cirillo