Relating Agile Development to Agile Operations
Rick Dove, Garry Turkington · 2008
Agile Enterprise and Agile Software Development are concepts with some considerable exposure in the language. Agility in the enterprise context usually refers to a system operational characteristic, while agility in the software context usually refers to a system development characteristic. Both are concerned with systems that must deliver satisfaction in an environment characterized by uncertainty and change. Our interests are not with either specifically, but rather with the general concept of a system life cycle, for any type of system, that must deal throughout with uncertainty and change. The work described in this paper began with the observation that Agile Development processes generally ignore the agility of the resultant system; yet they exhibit a solid foundation in certain generic architectural concepts that have been shown applicable across all types of systems that would be or are agile. The investigation established certain commonalities across a predominate variety of Agile Development processes, then cast these common concepts in the domain independent Response Ability architecture that grew from work at the Agility Forum, and finally modeled how this architectural characterization of development could be seamlessly extended throughout the remainder of the system life-cycle, consistent with observed characterizations of operational agility. The result promises a graceful transition from development into and through operational phases, with a single stable process architecture throughout.