A Quiet Milestone

Posted by Jeremy Miller on June 9, 2009

I wouldn’t read too much into this, but while I was giving my talk at the Austin .Net User’s Group last night I asked the crowd how many people were doing some form of Agile or just plain iterative development.  Almost every hand in the room went up.  I’m sure not everyone is doing it well (I’m not sure that we do it well), but the numbers were still staggering to me.  Sometime in 2005 Steve Donie and I did a talk at ADNUG on Continuous Integration and as I recall, only one bunch of people in the entire room was using CI.  Unscientifically, a lot of stuff has changed over the past 4-5 years.  I like that we spend more time now on how to do Agile (or Lean) development better instead of the same boring discussions about whether this new Agile thing can really work.

About Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy's thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer at http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller.
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  • http://www.dimecasts.net Derik Whittaker

    @Jeremy,

    I gave a session on SOLID last night in Milwaukee and asked a similar set questions.

    Mine were:
    # of people testing – 60-70%
    # of people using an isolation framework – 25%
    # of people with build servers – 10%

    I agree adoption is picking up, be we have not gotten there yet.

  • Alan Sheats

    The CodeProject newsletter yesterday pointed to an interesting article in the SDTimes entitled Agile: Dogma or Degree (http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33523) that is worth reading. Scott Ambler’s Agile Process Maturity Model that the article mentions is also valuable in assessing how far we have come. I don’t see you as endorsing dogma but rather applauding progress, regardless to what degree agile methods are being applied.

  • http://codebetter.com/members/jmiller/default.aspx Jeremy D. Miller

    @Skeptic,

    Austin *is* the 17th largest city in the US and a high tech hub. I really wouldn’t necessarily call Austin a closed community per se. The only thing that’s different maybe is that we have more smaller companies.

  • http://chadmyers.lostechies.com Chad Myers

    @Skeptic:

    I would hardly call Austin’s .NET user community a “closed, small” one. Certainly, compared to San Francisco or Boston it’s “smaller”, but not small.

    Austin’s .NET community is perhaps more progressive than, say New York’s or Boston’s, to be sure. So that does skew results somewhat.

    While Austin may be a few years ahead of some other markets in terms of progress of Agile, I do think Jeremy’s point stands, albeit as a leading indicator instead of a trailing one.

  • Skeptic

    Jeremy,

    Wondering if this is a skewed picture since you’re such a big proponent and it is your “local” UG. The influence you have in such a closed, small community is inordinately larger than say in San Francisco or Boston. Doesn’t this show that you and others have got the “local team” marching to the same beat?