RUP vs Agile

Gooddata is growing. I see new faces in our office every Monday. The Gooddata "legacy" is often under fire. Our new colleagues come from many different environments and bring new ideas and perspectives. That's how we got to the RUP vs Agile discussion.

We practice agile development (scrum) at Gooddata. We have just proudly started our fifth sprint. Our mantra is design, build & re-factor. Iterate quickly until it is done. And suddenly there is a new Yam (yet-another-Martin in our office) who talks about the old good Rational Unified Process. Analysis, design, implementation, deployment. Requirements, use-cases, class and sequence diagrams, logical and physical models etc.

So where is the truth? Where the agile meets RUP? How to marry concepts of these two worlds? I believe that RUP tells us WHAT we need to deliver (use-cases, diagrams, models, schemas, code and deployments) and Agile shows HOW to deliver all the above. The essential pieces that we can't live without need to go to the first iteration of the RUP delivery cycle. All the rest will follow in subsequent iterations. If an iteration crashes because of a new findings, we simply restart it. If we need to dump everything what we have done in an previous iteration we will dump it. If we keep the iterations very short we are not going to regret such loses. And we need to realize that we do not need to go all the way down from use-case to deployment in every iteration. The first iteration can end up with a half-baked command-line script that pretends some functionality rather than fully fledged component with all belts and whistles. We can get to deployment, REST API or whatever it needs later.

I believe that we can have the best from both worlds. Let's blend the proven methodology, useful deliverables and tools from the RUP with the agility, flexibility and efficiency that comes from the Agile. Quickly define the Gooddata way, start using it knowing that we are going to re-factor it million times in the Gooddata future. :)