Balancing Agility and Technical Debt

Balancing Agility and Technical Debt or at least that was the title of the event I went to last night courtesy of the folks at CAST Software. What did we actually talk about? Lots of things:

• If you’re going to do agile, do it, don't half do it and expect it to work
• Call out the places where people are calling a project "agile" without following the Agile practices; when the project fails it be because it was "agile"
• If you can only have the product owner one day a week, you can only develop one day a week
• Jenga as an analogy for technical debt – each iteration you push another piece out of the tower; either you rebuild your tower as you go, or know that down the line you’ll have a massive rebuilding exercise
• Engagement with the business is paramount – if you’re not engaging every day, you’re not agile

One really interesting thing everyone should read – System Error: Fixing the flaws of Government IT. I’ll pull out just one line:

We recommend that government adopts a much more agile approach to IT for one simple reason: it works.

I won the evening’s prize... A little light bedtime reading?