Assessing Agile Engineering Practices

Organizations are often reluctant to adopt the more challenging agile engineering practices—first seen together in Extreme Programming and later adopted by the Scrum Alliance as the Scrum Developer Practices. These practices are difficult to implement and sustain, and the benefits are often vague, subtle, and measurable only after months of disciplined effort. For an engineering practice to provide real organizational value, it must effectively address real throughput constraints. Rob Myers describes two techniques that help evaluate the impact of any change to the organizational system―Lean's Value-Stream Mapping and the Theory of Constraints' Five Focusing Steps. He describes the most common set of agile engineering practices from the standpoint of how they provide a return on investment, including their costs and how they often work in tandem to multiply the effect. Rob briefly discusses TDD, pair programming, and continuous integration; he then opens the discussion to evaluate practices chosen by the delegates for consideration.