Monday, March 11, 2013

Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto


 
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer's competitive advantage.
Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.
Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.
The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility.
Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.

Gartner 2010 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture

Recently Gartner released the 2010 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture (EA).  It's an interesting report. I'm not sure if there are really any surprises here but it worth looking at the macro themes of the report.
You can find additional resources here:

Source: Gartner July 2010 
What the report reveals is a set of macro themes for Enterprise Architecture.
  • Traditional Enterprise Architecture that is technology focused and driven has become mainstream.
  • A fundamental shift in the architecture community from IT Architecture to true Enterprise Architecture where Business Architecture is a first class citizen. EA is past the hype of the standard lip service of "We align IT with Business" and we are actually doing it. 
  • Business focused EA that is executed through Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA), Business Process Management (BPM), Capability analysis and modeling, and EA Performance Management
  • Frameworks are not as mature as they could be. This capability for EA is estimated by Gartner to be 10+ years out until productivity is realized. As you have heard from me in past posts and articles, I believe there is a level of pragmatism that is lost on the EA Tool providers. If they nail that, they will shorten that time to productivity significantly. 
  • While there is mainstream adoption of Enterprise Architecture, the maturity level is still low. This is shown in the Hype Cycle survey it stated that 73% of EA organizations aspire to be "mature". Does this mean that those 73% are not mature? 
Gartner has published the following abstract to the EA Hype Cycle
"The artificial walls between business and IT are crashing down, and EA is the bridge to integrate business and IT," said Philip Allega, Research Vice President, Gartner. "EA's original promise was its ability to provide future safe guidance given the desires and vision of an organisation's senior leadership team. As IT roles shift away from technology management to enterprise management, EA is suited to bring clarity to these blurred boundaries, and, by 2015, increased adoption of EA processes and uses by business will further IT's alignment with the organisation's culture, future-state vision and delivery of business value outcomes."
Early-generation EA, situated on the right side of the Hype Cycle, is marked by long-standing and well-practiced approaches such as enterprise technology architecture (ETA) and architecture assurance that have been supported by traditional and federated approaches to EA. While these practices help to direct tactical IT operations, they are often supported without a business future-state vision and, as such, limit the ability for organisations to achieve and demonstrate significant business value.
"Overall, EA slipped into the Trough of Disillusionment, along with EA tools, because EA practitioners couldn't or wouldn't push EA efforts to become integrated with the business, drawing an invisible wall between the business and IT," said Allega.
As EA practitioners have become more business-focused and organisations have become more hyperconnected, new approaches of managed diversity and middle-out have emerged on the Trigger slope, forming the latest generation of EA. These disciplines are employed by end-users to try to integrate and engage with the business as a partner. One of the emerging disciplines includes a middle-out EA approach, which according to Gartner will have a transformational impact on business in the next two to five years.
"The middle-out approach enables the creation of an adaptable architecture that can help manage rapid change and enable innovation by focusing on coordination through interfaces, rather than on control through top-down standards," said Allega.
Gartner found that 73 percent of clients aspired to support "mature enterprise architecture" during the next three to five years, demonstrating that business strategy will be pervasively understood and supported within EA and across business and IT. "We predict that by 2015, the marketplace of EA practitioners will find a landscape very different from today's environment," said Betsy Burton, Research Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner.
"To prepare for 2015, EA practitioners need to ensure that EA practices are driven by a clear business vision and defined business context, and that their EA program has stabilised the practices and disciplines that are less than two years to mainstream adoption."

POIG - Meetup On the Spur of the Moment

Poig
POIG is a great idea thats finally happened.   Have you ever wanted to just meetup with someone to grab a cup of coffee and talk about social business?  Or maybe you are having a hard time finding enough players for a pickup game of hoops?   You might try Poig.   The more friends you have the more the site makes sense.   Poig is not about RSVPing for a meetup or happening that wont be until next week.  Its something thats immediate.  The founder Joe Robinson said it was like a reverse Groupon - Im actually not sure what he meant by that - but I can imagine local businesses connecting in and offering deals for spur of the moment get togethers.  Using Facebook I joined in about 5 seconds.   Take a look at the main page and you can see the things happing right now on Poig.  Join the fun at http://Poig.com
Poig-what

dlvr.it - You Publish. We Deliver

Dlvr

Deliver It! - can take any of your RSS feeds and route them to any number of social sites including Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook.   You can filter, schedule and plan what goes out and where it goes.  This a well thought out tool that gets your material out into the social grid right away.  I can see small business using it to promote their business - by doing quick mini blog articles using Posterous or Tumblr.   Catch the wave at http://dlvr.it

 

Photofunia - Amazing and Free Online Photo Editing

Photofunia is another free online photo editing site.  What is remarkable is not just the array of effects - but the use of face recognition technology.   Photofunia can extract a face from a photo image and then super-impose it into different situations - as putting your mug on a billboard.  I had crazy fun just playing with it.   I imposed my wife's face onto Lulu the dancing girl.  Give it a whirl at http://Photofunia.com

SmarTweeter - Smart Tweets for better SEO

SmarTweeter is a new tool to help small businesses promote themselves on the web.   SmartTweeter will create tweets out of every page on your website.   You can edit the twitter messages and can schedule the tweets to be sent out automatically - or you can do it manually any time you like.   You can optionally use avoo.net to shorten all your urls.   All you tweets can be saved as they go out into a Tweets Directory - giving you some extra link juice.   SmarTweeter makes social media objects out of all your web pages without having to do anything.  In the near future SmartTweeter will place the outgoing tweets on content rich topic pages maintained by SocialPulse.com.   This will be a powerful way for a business to promote themselves - on Twitter and also have their webpage links placed on well visited pages.  Give it a spin at http://SmarTweeter.com

Phixr - Free Online Photo Editing

Jeffrey-july2010_54_medium_phi

Looks like a pretty useful tool for someone who doesnt have photoshop.  Phixr is not a photo gallery and doesnt store or show your photos - and your uploads are deleted after a short period.  Photos are only deleted if they are "idle" for 6 hours, never while you work with them (for registered users the period is 12 hours). Essentially - it lets you add features and effects to your uploaded photo.  Go to  http://phixr.com to signup.