Agile programming techniques spark interest

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March 14, 2002 (Computerworld) -- AMELIA ISLAND, FLA. -- More than two-thirds of all corporate IT organizations will use some form of "agile" software development process within 18 months, Giga Information Group Inc. predicted this week at its application development conference here.

But so far, only a small percentage of corporations have adopted an agile approach, which aims to help companies attack projects that have unclear or rapidly changing requirements, said Liz Barnett, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga. She estimated that just 10% of corporate IT organizations now use the emerging lightweight methodologies that are creating a stir these days in programming circles. However, Barnett said she suspects roughly 25% are exploring some form of agile process.

She recommended that companies consider supplementing old processes with some of the newer agile approaches. "I think they will have six or 10 different processes in a shop, and this will be one of them," she said.

At the Giga conference, attendees showed mixed degrees of interest in using elements of the various agile methodologies, which include extreme programming (XP), Scrum and Crystal. Agile approaches typically eliminate the extensive documentation process that can bog down developers, calling for projects to be broken down into pieces based on requirements and for functional code to be delivered in shorter time frames, which can range from 14 to 90 days depending on the methodology used.

Agile methodologies also generally call for more frequent testing and greater communication and feedback between developers and the users for whom they are writing the software.

Erkki Vuorenmaa, manager of local infrastructure in Helsinki, Finland, for Scandinavian banking chain Nordea, said he has concerns about being able to get businesspeople involved in the application development process. "It's really irritating," he said. "You have to drag them."

Walt Smith, chief IT architect at a large U.S.-based financial institution, who asked that the company not be identified, said the need to produce higher quality software more quickly will drive his company to consider agile methodologies. "Customers want applications in 90 days now, no matter how complex they are, and you can't do that with traditional methods," he said.

But Smith said he has yet to be convinced that agile processes will help his firm address its other problem: reducing development costs. He said working on an individual project may cut costs for that specific project, but the approach could wind up costing his company more when his team has to integrate the application with existing enterprise systems. He said his firm's early experiments with elements of XP on departmental applications produced code that didn't integrate well with the overall infrastructure or scale in production.

"We spent a

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