A quasi-agile development environment is one where the development team is trying to apply agile development techniques within a traditionally structured organization that has policies and procedures derived from a waterfall and CMMI framework.
When this is attempted within an organization, typically one of three things happens.
1. The organization holds the line on the traditional policies and procedures, and eventually the agile teams give up fighting. The development teams retain those few agile practices that do not conflict with the organization’s established policies and procedures, but the organization does not gain any substantial advantage in software development.
2. The local management agrees to support agile development as best as possible, but still has to put on a waterfall front at least some of the time. In this case the development team must practice the three principles elaborated above.
3. The organization holds the line, but the development team does not give in and the project either is cancelled or fails.
Obviously we want to avoid number three, but it unfortunately occurs too often.
Situation one can be viable but doesn’t add any substantial value to the organization.
Situation two is where the action is. We will always be learning new and better ways to build software. Large organizations will always be slow to adopt them. Whether or not your company has already made the switch to successful agile or quasi-agile development, newer and even better techniques are just around the corner. So even if you’ve mastered the application of the three principles in this article, hang on to them. You’ll need them again soon.
[1] http://www.jingproject.com/
[2] Kent Beck, Martin Fowler. Planning Extreme Programming. 2000 Addison-Wesley.
[3] Eliyahu M. Goldratt. It’s Not Luck. (1994) North River Press ISBN 0-88427-115-3
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