Agile methods, advice laid out at Dreamforce 2012

显示全部楼层 · 2007-1-24 12:56:49

Agile software development is at the core of Salesforce.com’s success, providing a framework for predictable high quality releases while fostering innovation, said the cloud provider’s head Agile coach, Evan Willey, in a session at Dreamforce 2012 last week. In this post, TheServerSide.com shares the Agile development techniques and advice Willey and Salesforce’s top development leaders delivered in that presentation.
Willey moderated the session, and panelists were Salesforce.com vice presidents Brian Zotter, Engineering and Cheryl Porro, Platform Quality Engineering, as well as Jason Winters, Principal Design Architect, User Experience; Pratima Arora, Director, Product Management; and Rajani Ramanathan, COO, Technology & Products.

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Rapid growth pushed Salesforce.com toward its Agile practice, dubbed Adaptive Delivery Methodology (ADM), in the early 2000s. Delivering products quickly became difficult. Release schedules slowed down, and quality control was difficult. In fact, Saleforce.com issued only one major release in 2006. http://scottdunn.blogspot.com/20 ... ess-with-agile.html
“It was a big shift going from waterfall to ADM,” but the release slowdown had to be fixed, said Porro.The company had to act quickly to deploy high-quality and innovative releases more frequently. The key to success was buy-in throughout the organization. “The whole team got on board,” Porro said. That’s true today, too, and every Salesforce.com employee is trained on ADM.
The team is a lot bigger than it was back in 1999. Salesforce.com started with three people in research and development when founded in 1999, and now has about 300 times more.

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Like Agile development, an ADM core practice is iterative development with a goal of rapid feedback. Other key principles include:
Eliminate waste by focusing only on what customer wants, not extra features. “Focus on the highest value delivered to customer, and get the most important thing out quickest,” said Porro.
Build quality into every step and every player’s work. Salesforce.com embeds testing and quality in every process, said Willey. Porro noted that quality also drives innovation.
Respect people, because that’s the engine that drives excellent delivery.“It’s about inspiring the team,” which requires continuous education and being open to ideas from all levels, said Porro.
Respect can be built into processes, said Ramanathan. “Provide a framework to take advantage of the talented people you’re hiring,” she said. One example is giving employees the option to change teams if they’re not happy on a team. Also, simple changes in processes can show respect for remote team members. When her stand-up meetings include on-site and remote team members,everyone calls in. “So, there’s not the dynamic of one group together in a room and others alone on the phone” missing non-verbal cues and often unable to hear everything said in the on-site room,she said.
Empower team members to make just-in-time (JIT) decisions. Giving team members the ability to make urgent decisions helps break dependencies that can cause missed iteration deadlines. Give your team members at every level room to operate, said Willey. Arora noted that rapid changes in technology and strategy calls for empoweringJIT decision-making.
“Agile is a bottom-up process, which gives authority at the bottom to say what works best or doesn’t work in the process,” said Aurora. “It gives power to the people.”
Fast delivery is crucial. “Fast delivery helps us meet our goals of getting feedback and validation quickly,” said Zotter. ADM teams use pilots, focus groups and other means of getting quick feedback. Winters noted that seeking constant feedback is a “way to protect the trust of enterprise customers while innovating.”

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Agile-based ADM has been an unmitigated success for Salesforce.com. Late releases are non-existent, and a three-times-a-year release schedule for product lines is a reality.
ADM and Agile will help Salesforce.com adapt to market and technology changes, said the panelists, naming mobile development as a current top challenge.
“The mobile revolution is pushing the limits of Agile and Scrum,” said Winters. “It’s an innovation explosion!” ADM principles help to make it through.
Winters also delivered the session’s final piece of Agile advice: “Always question what you are doing!”

For other development news and advice from Dreamforce 2012, check out these articles about Heroku and Java; connected applications; and a developer’s view of Salesforce App Exchange.

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This month marks the 15th anniversary of the Object Management Group (OMG) adoption of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as an official specification. Although at times controversial, UML has come to play a big role in modeling modern applications.
Before UML, the world of object-oriented analysis and design was overrun by many vying object methodologies. UML came about in large part from a collaboration of object methodologists Jim Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson and Grady Booch, who came to work together in the mid 1990s at Rational Software, now part of IBM.

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Rational had in fact responded to an OMG RFP for standards submissions. After various input (the eventual UML notation centered on "boxes" to represent classes, as opposed to Booch's original "clouds") a unanimous vote on 25 September 1997 recommended UML for adoption by the OMG's OA&D Task Force.
Today it is used to model structure and behavior of varied software systems throughout many industries. UML is the basis for many modeling tools, from companies both big and small. A milestone of sorts was holdout Microsoft's belated embrace of UML in 2008 (announced by no less than founder Bill Gates at his last TechEd keynote).

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UML grows bigger
If you look back before UML, there was a wide range of mostly mutually incompatible modeling options, said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, for people collaborating on open source software. "UML did a good job of pulling together a fairly fractured community and creating a standard that everyone could look to," he said. "It has enabled a whole modeling community, including the open source community here."
OMG President William Hoffman well remembers the roots of UML -- the era of plentiful modeling methodologies. "It was the follow-on battle to the battle to uncover 'which language was going to the big object-oriented language,'" he said. "It became the methodology and design war."
Through the years, UML has added additional elements, many of which support embedded systems and model-driven code generation. Some people now wonder whether it has been asked to do too much.
Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum, said UML has grown and changed -- but not always for the better. For instance, he notes, UML 2.0 grew so complex that, in his view, it became far less usable. "Many people using UML today actually rely on the original UML specification," he notes.

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Still, there is much to admire in UML. It may be said to have foreshadowed a broader commitment to standards in application development -- one that was less notable in the mid-1990s than it is today.
"This was a particularly vibrant time in software engineering, with powerful ideas coming from many other methodologists," noted Grady Booch (currently IBM fellow, chief scientist for software engineering, IBM Research) in a prepared statement.
"It was a rare case where an industry standard, presented by several people in one company, actually won over a bunch of rivals," said Baer. He said UML came along on one of the waves of application development innovation, in this case following on the development of client-server computing in the early 1990s.
"All of a sudden there was a vast flowering of development once we were free of the green screen," he says. At the time, too, computer-aided software engineering (CASE) had fizzled spectacularly, despite endless hype.

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"CASE was a top-down disaster, but some people felt that maybe some of the modeling concepts it included might be helpful to explore,'' he says. And, despite clashes of egos and interests, "IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle actually agreed."
While UML has incorporated many extensions and profiles over time, some have been less successful than others. Baer points out that Systems Modeling Language (SysML), a general-purpose modeling language for systems that is directly descended from UML, has been "an unqualified success story," he says.
OMG's Hoffman says the somewhat numerous UML extensions are a byproduct of the OMG's open specification process. "Our specification process is open," he said. "UML goes where the community wants it to go. We are actually tickled to see all the uses it's been extended to since its early days of doing diagrams."

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"UML 2.0 is a bigger language than UML 1.1 was," said Ed Seidewitz, vice president for Model Driven Architecture Services at Model Driven Solutions. "Whether it is too big is a judgment call."
The language does not require software architects to use it in its entirety, he notes, and different individuals use different parts.
"Most people don't use the whole language. There is very little that isn't being used by someone," he said. "The key thing is you can have a big language, and you don't have to use the whole thing."
UML still has room for growth, and at times it has been positioned as somewhat anathema to Agile development. For his part, Baer says UML's adoption was blunted somewhat by the pressure to speed development and delivery and by Agile software development. "People were anxious to avoid analysis paralysis," he said, "and that put a brake on UML."
"For many, UML is how they define their own models; they like to draw visuals and use and activity diagrams, which is part of UML," said Ed Merks, president of Macro Modeling and technical lead of the Eclipse Modeling project.
"Certainly there are a lot of organizations out there that like UML and see it as an important standard and make use of it to describe their information, the things they are trying to do and share in a visual way with other architects and to fully specify what needs to be implemented," said Merks.