Nathan Wilson

It is a long held principle of Agile development that face to face communication is the gold standard for interactions. I have been thinking a lot about this while following the debate on telecommuting following Yahoo’s elimination of working from home. The truth is that the Nexus forces of Mobile and Social have changed the [...]

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The transition to agile requires major changes to many roles outside of the development group. One of the bigger impacts is on how projects are managed.  I came across an example of this week. An agile team did not complete all of the stories for a sprint.  The reaction of the program manager was to [...]

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Happy new year! It is 2013 and the Mayan apocalypse did not happen after all. We have also avoided the “fiscal cliff”, at least for a couple of months.  However the IT world is going through a form of “end times”. It is now clear what we are coming to the end of the traditional long-duration [...]

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This week marks my one year anniversary as a Gartner analyst. I have authored 11 pieces of research. Most are advise for those transitioning to agile, but there are several aimed at more advanced agile practitioners. I have also co-authored several more, including the Application Development Market clock where I added incremental and waterfall to [...]

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I just returned from the Microsoft Visual Studio launch. Having been out of the loop with Microsoft for the last few years, the biggest surprise for me was that most of the Keynote was on how Visual Studio enables Agility. While many vendors talk about agile these days, the most interesting detail for me was [...]

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One of the unfortunate side effects of the tension between agile and waterfall development methodologies has been a polarization of views on the subject. The reality is that many companies were starting to become more iterative in their development methodologies before the signing of the agile manifesto in 2001. This has pushed many traditional shops [...]

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We are working on the Hype Cycle for Application Development here and Project Level Agile is pretty close to the trough of disillusionment. While this can seem like the end of agile, it is a normal part of any IT trend that is going mainstream. The early days of any trend are full of promise, [...]

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I was a speaker at a testing conference last week. A lot of the conversations were about the divide that exists between QA and the rest of development. I guess that this is to be expected in a traditional “throw software over the wall to QA” project, but I am surprised on how often it [...]

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The agile movement started, or more accurately named 11 years ago and sometimes I think that that was the last time that agile developers and traditional developers talked. Over the last 11-13 years, I have seen many new coding practices mature. For example, Test Driven Development (and it’s close cousins Behavior Driven Development and Acceptance [...]

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I have now been at Gartner for six months. Over that time I have had over 50 contacts with Gartner clients and published 7 research notes. The best part of this job is the opportunities to talk to people from all over the globe that are doing agile development and want to improve their effectiveness. [...]

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