Gartner as well as Cutter Consortium tell us about more and more clients who realize that agile methods — if defined by XP, SCRUM, or the Agile Manifesto — let developers forget that they should also think about product features that are to guarantee maintainability of the software in the long run.
And indeed: So far the problem is that in contrast to a Software Owner (a CIO), the typical Product Owners in the sense of SCRUM do not think beyond the development phase of the software life cycle.
After trying out Agile for some years, CIOs more and more realize that teams doing agile software development left chaos: software that is neither well defined nor easy to maintain.
Evangelists of Agile should accept that Software Owners are stakeholders quite different from Product Owners and that therefore Agility as defined by the Agile Manifesto is far from being professional enough.
This is why we need
- The New (2011) Definition of Agile
and - Agile Methods no longer ignoring a prominent stakeholder: the CIO.
A process model for software development not ignoring CIO’s interest is Specify, Subcontract, Test (SST).
ggreiter 