Great lead in question by Scott Gruthrie Silver Light team at Microsoft.

It is really not a choice so much as it is a discussion about how they can re-invigorate their very agile roots. Agile is not yours to keep, to remain agile you must practice the fundamentals. Microsoft has clearly been very agile in the past and acquired very agile organizations. My question becomes — How do they get it back or get it again?

The video is found here.

My comments follow

The word Agile:  We can take it in different ways for different people but, from what I have experienced it is often a mess in understanding. There are very few good stable definitions out there from which to build a know center of understanding. Too often marketing has taken hold of the word and warped it’s meaning for personal gain. Or agile “experts” have not really nailed the term down to anything stable. Nothing is wrong with that, it’s just good business or people learning. However, the result is that it permeates a very messy set of understandings into the community at large.

Clean code and clean tools allow for rapid feedback which enables a quick practice of agile understanding. A good IDE will enable rapid feedback so that the fundamentals are practiced continuously. When I use the word fundamentals it is like in basketball. You are never done dribbling the ball. Unit tests are a way to achieve rapid feedback but, like all of the agile practices not a panacea. Unit testing is a piece to a bigger evolving puzzle.

Common mistake when people view Microsoft is too see it as one company. My experience is they made up of many subgroups or companies within a larger framework. Some subgroups are very agile and some are not. The agility is not evenly distributed and understood within Microsoft. No surprise there, every big company I have consulted with has this problem. Some groups (teams and individuals) within Microsoft are great agilists, not all. They have some of the best in the world.

It was a good quick talk on adopting scrum and agile.

- Doug