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Six Techniques Lie at the Heart of IT Agility
Master these techniques to succeed in the game of agile development
Your skill in using just six techniques in appropriate combinations to address different situations is the measure of your IT agility. I call these the core techniques. Just as a game like basketball is composed of a small group of core techniques such as dribbling, passing, guarding and shooting, so too is the game of developing information systems.
The skill levels of project teams can be measured by their capabilities in these techniques. By employing these techniques, a project team will always be able to produce competent (and sometimes even brilliant) results. These six techniques are a simple yet comprehensive set of skills that can be taught and mastered by people involved in building systems. These core techniques are:
1) Joint applications design (JAD)
2) Process mapping or Data flow diagramming
3) Data modeling
4) System prototyping
5) Object oriented design and programming
6) System testing and rollout.
There are other techniques that may be relevant from time to time, but these six core techniques are always relevant in every situation regardless of the technology being used or the problems being addressed. The best practitioners of IT agility are competent in all of them and masters of some of them.
IT agility happens when people use creative combinations of these techniques to define, design and build solution systems for the challenges they face. The JAD technique is key for pooling the insights and ideas of business and technical people to define possible solutions. Combinations of JAD, process mapping, and system prototyping are key to further exploration of possible solution systems and creation of detailed system design specifications. Then building systems from design specifications calls for the techniques of object oriented design and programming and system testing and rollout.
These techniques are well known in the IT profession; they weren’t created yesterday. Do a web search on any of these techniques and you will find hundreds of references to them and many options for getting education and training in them. In IT agility, these are the basic skills of the game. It is possible to get a very accurate assessment of the chances for success of a project team on an agile development project (or any IT development project for that matter) by measuring their skill
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