Agile Development

Review of the Government Accountability Office report on Agile Development

Details

Published on Friday, 12 October 2012

The GAO forms a part of the United States Congress. Among other things, they are responsible for auditing and testing federal programs. They have a great insight on the agile software development in the federal government through their analysis.

It’s prudent to find out why GAO did the studies before we delve into the process of finding answers.

The explanation given for the above was that they wanted to identify the organizations that incurred cost overruns and the schedule delays in their software development projects. The office of management & budget (OMB) has thus come up with a technique known as Agile, in which the technical debt is minimized by breaking up the development into small chunks.

So what Government Accountability Office (GAO) have found?

For applying Agile development methods in software practices, Gao came up with about 32 practices. These practices are similar and relate to other key skills related to software development and planning, namely: strategic planning, preparation, organizational commitment & collaboration, execution, and evaluation.

Agile has proved to be effective on real time scenarios and this has been verified by the officials. In a more specific way, each of these practices found favor with all the agencies, and there were five agencies that found ten of these practices to be effective. They are given below

• Start with Agile guidance and an Agile adoption strategy.

• Migrate to Agile concepts by using Agile terms, such as user stories (it is used to convey requirements), and Agile examples, such as demonstrating how to write a user story.

• Constantly improve Agile adoption at both the levels i.e. project and organization level.

• Try to identify and address impediments at the organization as well as project levels.

• Frequently obtain feedback from stakeholder/customer. 

• Empower cross-functional, small teams.

• Include requirements that are related to security and progress monitoring in your queue of unfinished work (the backlog).

• Gain trust by demonstrating value at end of each iteration.

• Track progress by using tools & metrics.

• Track progress daily & visibly.
 

In addition to that, the following are the 14 challenges that GAO identified in the research. They are:

1. Difficulty for teams in collaborating closely. 
2. Procurement practices might not support Agile projects.
3. Teams faced difficulty transitioning to self-directed work.
4. Clients didn’t trust iterative solutions.
5. Staff faced difficulty committing to more timely & frequent input.
6. Teams faced difficulty in managing iterative requirements.
7. Agencies faced trouble committing staff.
8. Compliance reviews were complicated to execute within an iteration time frame.
9. Timely adoption of new tools was quite difficult.
10. Federal reporting practices do not align with Agile.
11. Technical environments were difficult to establish & maintain.
12. Traditional artifact reviews do not align with Agile.
13. Agile guidance was not clear. 
14. Traditional status tracking does not align with Agile.