Denis Shapovalenko

Mini research: Agile development

"Agile software development is a conceptual framework for software engineering that promotes development iterations throughout the life-cycle of the project" Wikipedia says. But there is a much self-contained definition at agilemodeling.com: "Agile is an iterative and incremental (evolutionary) approach to software development which is performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams with "just enough" ceremony that produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner which meets the changing needs of its stakeholders".

Agile development is all about making project done and working as fast as possible. It means that focus must be taken from some things and put to another. In this case "losers" are: prediction, documentation, processes, tools, contracts and plan. And the "winners" are: people, interactions, working software, collaboration, quick respond to changes. Let's see where it takes us.

Agile development appeared in 1990 as a result of heavy-weight project management approaches, that used in technology and required much resources and time. One of that approaches is Waterfall model, which passively flows the project over predefined stages. What is bad - it could be slow and not flexible at all. Some other models include but not limited to Cleanroom, Iterative, RAD, ScrumRUP, Spiral, XP, Scrum.

There is a document called "Manifesto for Agile Software Development" that is located at special website and allows to sign it whoever wants to. It is short and quick (as supposed to be for Agile) and says:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

It describes the approach pretty clear, thou there are many sites in Internet, outlining it more specific. There are also a Principles of this approach, which disclose the needed focus position to get inside the model. The main idea is: Get things working, respond to changes and don't care too much about the rest.

But there is still a plan and management and goals and limits and so on. What makes Agile different is that only main goals are kept in mind always, throwing away not so important details and focusing on working software and satisfied customers. What is important and what is not - is described in Manifesto.

While Waterfall model is completely build on consciousness and prediction, the Agile model is alive and running. When Waterfall does it slow and stubborn, Agile dances. While Waterfall plans, Agile does. If we look at the World - we see that that the winner is one who "does". Perfectness is "a plus", not is "a must". What today is a must - is working stuff just on time.

This model is quite exciting and can make your and developer's life instantly get more "alive" and interesting, while the customers are satisfied and happy and the software is working great. Since it is done fast - the cash flow is all green too. If things go this way - no one will look behind and say "hey, that's not exactly what we planned at start", it just does not matter now.

So if you want to be more adaptive, flexible, fast and productive - you might want to get deeper inside the subject and find out more about techniques, that stand behind it.

There is Agile Alliance, organization, that took care about  the model.
There is a on-line book from Martin Fowler "The New Methodology".
You can download PDF book "Essential Skills for Agile Development" (427 pages) at agileskills.org.

And there are other comprehensive sites about the topic you might want to read:
1. Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development
2. VersionOne
3. XPProgramming.com
4. Agile Development In 30 Seconds
5. Ten tips on agile software development
6. Good Agile, Bad Agile
7. The New Methodology

This article is written in Agile style itself - it gives you understanding about the topic, it is friendly and opened for collaboration, gives you the links for further research and took me not more than 30 minutes together with research and finding images :) And I got real pleasure on focusing on what is matter - delivering the needed knowledge to you and making it fast. Now you know it on practice is this what you want or not.

Mini research: Semantic web

I've recently done some mini-research on Semantic Web and here what I found.

Wikipedia says: "The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the meaning of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content" (see more).

Not clear enough, I need details.

Key terms:

XML - The common language used for data storage and exchange (see wikipedia).

RDF (Resource description framework) - The XML-based language, used to describe everything. See wikipedia article for general information and official site for complete documentation if you need to.

OWL (Web Ontology Language) - Extended language, based on XML and RDF, used for describing objects and connections between them. Wikipedia article shows general info and there is official site for full specifications.

SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language [yes, it's recursive acronym]) - The RDF query language. See wikipedia and official site.

See full structure on diagram below:

How does it work?

Data on web sites is being described using languages above. There is software, that can read this language. By reading, it can classify and identify content on the pages. This makes software to "understand" the information as humans do.

A software may vary from web-based agents to desktop applications.

For example, you can describe your contact information using standard tags and commands of semantic languages and that will make you browser "understand" that there is a contact information on the page and that that particular number is the phone number of this contact name.

The browser is just one example of software, that can use this information. It is done on some level now and is planning to develop in the nearest future. For example there are add-ins for Firefox browser Operator and Tails Export and Internet Explorer 8 is claimed to support these features.

But browsers are just the beginning, the main goal is to connect web resources together using standard approach and protocols and transform the Web to a structured and classified database, which takes the web to another level - from the chaotic mix of information, where users have to distinguish things by themselves, to a world wide database, that can be queried and given automated results depending on previously made semantic descriptions. This gives to Web a totally new quality - integrity, where it can act as a single object, giving absolutely new product - query result.

Now when we know how it is planned to evolve, we can think do we like it or not.

What is going on now?

All these languages and protocols are mainly developed, supported and promoted at World Wide Web Consortium (W3) and it's director Tim Bernes-Lee, the inventor of World Wide Web.

W3 has developed a row of approaches and frameworks, called W3 Semantic Web Activity. As I can see the guys are working hard for making things done and changes to the Web are happening right now. More and more web sites are starting to support semantic tools and approaches. Even giants like Microsoft and Yahoo starting to deploy it in it's products (see article at ZDNET).

But despite all benefits of the approach, the frameworks are very complex and complicated to apply. That's why Web will probably need some time to adopt new principles. Simpler and more easy-to-deploy services will start to show up.

One of them, and probably the only really popular organization is Microformats (ZDNET article above shows us where it is being used now). It gives us a basic tools to easily deploy elements of semantic web to our web sites. The tools are standardized and supported by major software developers. You can read about how to use it on their site.

Using Microformats we can easily describe some of our web site elements, such as people, events, reviews, locations and tags and export them to semantic software (browser add-ins are among them, Microsoft products are getting ready to handle it too).

There is probably one, who could be unhappy about this trends - search advertising companies, since they use principles of "old" web, where human is the one, who distinguish things. When machines will learn to make difference between "apples" and "oranges" - humans will not read so much unwanted content. But I feel those companies will find their gaps ;)

So what to do?

Transforming the social Web2.0 to semantic Web3.0 and putting it on new rails will take time, so no need to panic, guys at W3 will make their job. But we must not ignore the new tendencies, we can and must prepare for new order.

Now it's great time to look at simple and easy-to-deploy, yet standardized approaches such as Microformats and use it as wide as we can. Wikipedia, Twitter, Yahoo Local and many other popular resources are already using elements of semantic web. If we want to get in stream - it's time now to relax about social and enjoy the new wave of semantic.

What I did - applied the hCard Microformat semantic code to contacts page on my web site - take a look ;)

See more

You might also want to see some extra links I visited today:
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/semantic-web1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_core
http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/
http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator
http://microformats.org/wiki/get-started

Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!
Denis Shapovalenko