Saturday, August 10, 2013

Agile and System Engineering -- Case Study


In a recent edition of the online "Journal of Cyber Security and Information Systems" we find a decent article on agile and system engineering set in a project example context.

Of interest to agilists should be the reference to various frameworks that provide services and tools for different aspects of the project. In broad strokes, the authors have divided their world into business, system, and software aspects.

Another way to look at this article is as an example of "agile in the waterfall". The authors posit, as have we here at Musings, that the grand strategy for such embedding is to work through defined and documented interfaces.

The authors go a step further -- further than I would go, but probably not fatal -- by inventing the idea of the "trusted black box" which is more or less their description of the embedded agile iteration-release model we've talked about before.

I am more comfortable with the old cold war strategy: "trust by verify". That is, no one in a project can be allowed to just take resources and go off to do their thing. (See: command and control lingers on).  In any event, trusted black box is their coin; I like it; I'll probably use it again.


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