I often faced the following dilemma:

• either use a process framework such as IBM RUP that might be too complex for the situation at hand and has therefore to be heavily customized,
• or set up a process framework such as Scrum that lacks practices to manage some more complex areas of the project.

If like me you often ended up in this awkward position, I suggest you seriously consider OpenUP (Open Unified Process, a lightweight, open source, agile offspring of RUP). Not only the process framework makes sense, but on top of that you can rely on the equally free Method Composer of the Eclipse Process Framework to easily tailor the process to your needs. Compared to two years ago when I first looked at OpenUP, the process framework and the tools are now mature and enjoy the support of a thriving community of people who, like me, struggled to find an agile framework that can scale.

I invite you to read this short article from Bjorn Gustafsson: OpenUP - The Best of Two Worlds.

Looking back at the last few years, I can't help but notice that agilists tend to integrate some traditional techniques as they bump into agile limitations, and similarly traditional methodologies progressively embrace agile principles to reap the benefits of agility.

For example, I am currently working on a presentation that helps agilists make the link with non agile stakeholders and management. How can a ScrumMaster answer the questions "how much will this project cost?" or "should we make or buy?" for example. Some might say that this goes beyond the purpose of agile. They are wrong. There is no valid reason to restrict agility to project execution and leave the rest to traditional approaches. Expanding agile practices to bridge these gaps is actually quite straightforward.

Note that the goal is not to agilify the whole organization, but simply to position agile at solution level, and not just at software development level.

Conversely, traditional methodologies are progressively adopting agile principles. Some, like IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP), made the turn years ago to integrate core agile practices. Others, like PMBOK, only pay lip service to Agile and even avoid using the word. Some methodologies produced agile spin-offs, like OpenUP for IBM RUP.

This is all good news for IT professionals and their clients. Indeed the combination of practices, whether traditional or agile, according to the situation at hand, is certainly more constructive than the bickering of righteous traditionalists vs. agile evangelists (yes, agilists can be narrow-minded too).

I expect the convergence of agile and traditional approaches to give rise to a new generation of practices that expand beyond software development and leverage the collaborative effect of agile organization. Actually I'm not only expecting it, but contributing to make it happen.

(I loosely use the word "methodology". It might refer to software development process, project management, organizational paradigm, or whatever stands for "the way we work" in your mind.)

Since a few months I am involved in the development of Agile Benchmark, a web application allowing users to evaluate their development practices against "best practices" from multiple methodologies (Scrum, RUP, OpenUP, PMBOK, Lean), with emphasis on Agile principles.

I believe Agile Benchmark has huge potential, first because there is a strong demand to answer the question "how agile are we?" and second because to my knowledge there is no such tool readily available on the web (yet).

After a lot of hard work (one of the reasons I didn't post these last two months) the beta release is finally out. It's public and it's free, so have a look at it!

Your comments are appreciated!