Agile Software Exploration

Methodology

Words taken from the most popular sources for each methodology, and "normalized". See blog post here: http://ndpsoft.blogspot.com/2009/09/scrum-xp-agile-and-visualizing.html

In short: I went to the most popular sources for the various agile software methodologies and found what was (in my opinion), the canonical summary of it. For example, the Agile Manifesto has a one page values page and 12 principals. Some were less obvious, and I identified a chapter on lean software as my source.

After identifying the source, I indexed the "concepts". There's lots of squishyness here, and lots of room for error and opinions to sneak in. I repeated my process on XP and agile, and got subtly different results. Not great from a scientific method point of view, but let's call it "experimental error".

After identifying the concepts, I went through a process of "normalizing" those into what seemed like the same concept. Again, lots of room for error. Are "sprints" the same as "iterations"? Well, I had to make lots of calls.

Finally, I wanted to visualize this data. I looked at different options, rejected quite a few. MindMaps are neat, but don't really promote the comparison I wanted. Any sort of graph didn't work well. I finally settled upon the visual theseaurus metaphor. I actually rejected this as "flashy" and unnecessary use of software when I first saw it, but the more I thought about it, the better fit it was.

Agile Software Methodologies Visualization by Andrew J. Peterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.kylescholz.com.