Bishop Fox and other industry colleagues discuss the benefits of the agile methodology.

Transcript

Mark Sariewski, HP: Historically it's been like a very long relay race: one person, one team doing their thing for some fixed period of time and then be done. And now it's much more like folks in an Olympic rowing competition. We're all in the boat together. We're all doing simultaneous work for shorter periods of time, and then we start another short race.

Raf Howery, CapGemini: Agile is a methodology that takes in a large system and breaks it into manageable subcomponents.

Mark Tomlinson, HP: The biggest value you get out of agile development is the flexibility and the accuracy with which you can arrive at a release date or a milestone confidently with minimal risk.

Genefa Murphy, HP: Approximately seventy-five percent of customers are starting to adopt some form of agile or iterative methodology.

David West, Forrester Research: Top-down adoption tends to be driven by a senior manager, tends to be driven by a business need. Serious, you know business catalyst has happened to the organization. Bottom-up adoption tends to be driven more by developers going on some training classes, reading books, and desiring to do agile.

Brenda Larcom, Bishop Fox (Stach & Liu): The cool thing about agile is that it can keep up with changing requirements.

Ravit Danino, HP: Agile is all about flexibility of the way that you are managing thing; is the ability to provide fast feedback.

Mark Tomlinson, HP: More and more, we see customers adopting agile methodologies, and each of them are asking us how we can move testing forward in the process in an efficient manner, as well as a cost-effective manner.

Genefa Murphy, HP: The most common challenges we see customers facing our prioritization and planning. control and visibility. and collaboration and stakeholders.

Ravit Danino, HP: So the R&D needs to work differently. We needed to create some kind of virtual teams that will include R&D people, QA people, and functional people.

Vinay Chandra, Cognizant: In order to avoid the pitfalls and energy environment, make sure the documentation is crisp.

Raf Howery, CapGemini: People assume that if you if you have it you don't have to do testing. That is not true. You still have to do testing; you just do it on smaller components that eventually add up to the entire system.

Mark Tomlinson, HP: Performance testing just can't happen early enough with an agile process, and so the biggest challenge is how can I test an application that doesn't have a GUI or is not finished being built yet.

Brenda Larcom, Bishop Fox (Stach & Liu): Incorporating security into every sprint is a great way to get security as cheaply as possible. It's less effort to do it that way.

Raf Howery, CapGemini: Accelerators are basically a prepackaged box. It includes requirements. It includes data. It includes test scripts and scenarios with some expected results, all preconfigured, all prepackaged.

Mark Sariewski, HP: Developers have the tools they need; the same tools they've been using, but we're bringing agile to the rest of that team - to the business analyst, to the quality team, to
the performance testers to the security folks.

David West, Forrester Research: It really is about empowering people to solve problems and become better at doing the job that they do. Management can get involved by both driving bottom-up approaches and top-down approaches by investing in their people, training, coaching, and the tools that support them.

Mark Sariewski, HP: A COE model is a perfect complement the perfect marriage with agile projects, and applications are getting more and more complex. So bringing in the most expert people that you can at exactly the right time - the best performance tester, the best security testing folk to hit the ground running - that participate perfectly as part of that well-oiled machine is the recipe for success with agile.

Brenda Larcom, Bishop Fox (Stach & Liu): HP's application security tools offer a very fast time-to-market solution, which is important for agile because you're trying to move rapidly through sprints. They're also very scalable, particularly the SAS versions of web inspect and amp offer something that deploys quickly and scales up.

Mark Sariewski, HP: Everybody's in the boat together rowing at the same time. It's no longer a relay race with a handoff that one person to the next.

Mark Tomlinson, HP: Testing can accelerate and improve the quality of every release you do with every sprint, and performance is an integral part of that.

Brenda Larcom, Bishop Fox (Stach & Liu): Make security a part of your everyday sprint activities.

Ravit Danino, HP: I think both from the quality perspective and functionality perspective, we are getting a better product to harness the power of agile.

Vinay Chandra, Cognizant: To harness the power of agile, I would say keep it simple.

Genefa Murphy, HP: To truly harness the power of agile, you need to communicate and collaborate.

Mark Sariewski, HP: Everybody plays or nobody plays.