Agile with Legacy Systems
After googling around tonight I’m beginning to think our experiments trying to do Agile with mainframe development are extremely rare. That’s right we actually have at least one pure Agile mainframe project. Apparently it’s fallen into more on an iterative waterfall approach, but we are almost off the bleeding edge on this one.
I’d love to hear about anyone else’s experiments around this, but I fear we may be almost alone on it.
Ed Gibbs @ October 13, 2006
Joshua K. of Industrial Logic once mentioned on a mailing list (possibly the industrialxp list) working with a client doing mainframe work in FORTRAN.
Said he would help them try to figure out how to do TDD on the mainframe.
That was a year or two ago.
I think one of the challenges in doing agile projects with mainframe technologies is the lack of tools that support some of the basics of agile development, including integrated support for basic refactorings, unit test frameworks, and continuous integration. You’d have to make your own tools and do some of the basic agile practices manually. It could become pretty tedious and hard to sustain. But some of the other practices are certainly do-able, like team collocation, close customer involvement, iterations, retrospectives, pair programming, and probably others.
Finding any stories of an Agile mainframe project appears to be fairly difficult. Maybe I should post the question on the scrum mailing list to see if someone does have a story successful or otherwise.
Our nastiest issue is our mainframe teams just aren’t able or willing to even break down features to something they can code in less than 30 days. Thus on the last few days of the Sprint if we’re lucky they push something over to the QA environment far too late to be fully tested for the end of the Sprint.