Ambler on Agile

A recent presentation by Scott Ambler was posted as a podcast (audio file) on TheServerSide.com. Scott Ambler is a great speaker so you really don’t need the slides. He starts out pretty fuzzy but after yelling a bit about the military and upper management Scott seems to get his groove and gives a great talk. 🙂 He talks about some “agile” techniques and why and how this would work in practice. He also mentions the Eclipse Process Framework, a new process support tool project, for which Ambler provides Agile process blocks. I saw Scott on last years JavaPolis, where he talked about Agile Database Modeling, which is less crazy than it may sound initially. Another Javapolis talk on Agile Model Driven Development is available online.

A lot of techniques and ideas that are really just common sense are called “Agile” to make it look fresh and new. To me, agile means something more specific, but the ideas presented are often real ideas for real problems, and that’s what interests me about talks like those by Ambler. The notion of piecing different good ideas together to determine the process seems a better fit than the “one process to rule them all” approach often chosen. You do need good ideas for that to work though. 🙂 Too bad Scott talks just enough to get you interested, then you have to read his books to get the details. I guess even the agile guys have a commercial side… 😉