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THE CURRENT BATTLEGROUND

As with any war, there is a lot of propaganda. And anywhere there is propaganda, there are slogans. For the agile development folks, the slogan is probably, "We're agile, and you're slow, bloated, and old-fashioned." If you believe the application developers, agile development is a minimal, fast-track approach, and everything else, especially CMM, is heavy-handed, bureaucratic, and doomed to failure.

On the other hand, CMM proponents point to the fact that CMM is used by some of the largest software organizations in the world on some of the largest projects. Their slogan would probably be, "Agile development is for small (inconsequential) projects; if you want to do some important (big, mission-critical) ones, you need CMM!"

As is always the case, there is some truth to both these points of view. CMM is bureaucratic and somewhat prone to producing huge amounts of paper. It is very expensive, but then again, so is failure. Small boats are, as a rule, faster and more maneuverable than big boats; on the other hand, you can't transport millions of gallons of oil or thousands of passengers on a small boat. The approaches that you use on small projects often don't scale up.

The agile development folks respond that their management movement is just as much a development strategy. If you're careful, they maintain, with how you plan your increments, you can do big things with a lot fewer people in a lot less time. They argue that you can create much larger projects (and organizations) than you could have in the past. The key is collaboration and commitment.

So who are you to believe? Well, as with most things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The war between CMM and agile development provides the opportunity to make both approaches better.