At the Software Test Professionals conference this week, Kent Beck, the creator of Extreme Programming, gave one of the most eye-opening keynote talks I have heard. It was on agile development, except that it never used the word agile. Instead, he focused on what it would take for an organization to deploy software more quickly. Specifically, he looked at what would have to change in the processes to move from deploying software annually to quarterly, quarterly to monthly, monthly to weekly, weekly to daily, and daily to hourly.
He was speaking to the wrong audience. Actually, it was the right audience, in that a good part of the processes he described as having to change were quality and testing ones, but the audience wasn’t particularly receptive to his message. I suspect it was because he advocated breaking down barriers that most don’t want to see broken down.
Beck noted that one of the primary barriers to increasing the frequency of deployments is the distance that communication has to travel in an organization. The focus of agility is to reduce the distance communication has to travel.
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