Agile and Risk Management

February 10, 2009

A common debate among agilistas is how to handle risk management in agile development processes. In a brief discussion over at InfoQ (http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/agile-risk-management), a few folks from the community weigh in. If you’re new to this conversation, it’ll get you up to speed very quickly.

From my point of view, I agree with Mike Cottmeyer’s assessment that agile builds risk management into every step of the process. In fact, it would seem that agile—an approach to development that attempts to respond to emerging conditions as quickly as possible—was designed for the sole purpose of improving risk mitigation. After all, when a team can see a problem and swarm to resolve it immediately, that’s identifying a risk and cutting it out of the equation. So if your team is working incrementally and iteratively, meeting daily to discuss progress and impediments, and frequently soliciting feedback from the customer (and it should be, if you’re calling what you do ‘agile’), then it’s practicing project management that is hyper-focused on risk mitigation.

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Agile Auditions

February 6, 2009

Over at ITWorld, reporter Matt Heuser makes an interesting observation. Though software development has been radically reshaped in the past decade and now asks developers to accomplish their work in a considerably different way, the interview/hiring process has stayed very much the same. But in this short Q & A with Menlo Innovation founder Richard Sheridan and Menlo’s in-house agile evangelist Lisamarie Babik, a few days before they presented their ideas at XP West Michigan, we are introduced to a new kind of interview. Sheridan calls it “the extreme interview” and likens it more to an audition, since it is based more on demonstrating certain skill sets than simply relating them through a conversation. In essence, when Menlo hires new developers, the company invites 50-60 candidates to an extreme interview, in which they must pair with one another to showcase how well they work in teams.

Sounds like a way to make an interview even more nerve-racking, right? Well, that’s not the idea. These interviews are designed to simulate the actual work environment as closely as possible, so that Menlo can base their hires on actual evidence of these skills—not just a resume’s claim. After all, if the point of agile is to respond as quickly and nimbly to unexpected conditions, this approach to interviewing definitely measures a candidate’s capacity for agility! Read the full interview here: http://www.itworld.com/career/61834/hiring-software-developers-agile-aptitude-test

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