Computerworld Talks About "2.0" When It Should Be Talking About Agile

By Mike Riversdale /
Computerworld has a fairly bog standard article entitled, Five Web 2.0 development lessons for enterprise IT ("Corporate IT departments would benefit from adopting the methodology, some say"), that espouses a "2.0" spirit which totally misses the point.

Web 2.0 does indeed live in a "constant beta" mode as the Computerworld article opens:
Yahoo's Flickr unit reported recently that the latest update to the photo sharing website went live just before 5pm with nine changes made by three of its developers. The "deployment" was the 36th new release in a week where 627 changes were made by 21 developers.

Such constant tweaking — called a perpetual beta in the Web 2.0 world — is common for companies like Flickr, which build applications for a consumer market that's always in flux.

However this isn't because they are "Web 2.0", it's because they are agile companies.

In a nutshell:
  • some "2.0"companies use agile development techniques
  • some corporate IT Departments use agile development techniques
  • being "2.0" does not mean you are agile
  • using agile dev techniques does not mean you have to be a "2.0" shop
Using an agile development technique (such as Scrum) will help any team address the five points that Computerworld highlight as "must do's" for IT Departments:
  1. Break the barrier between developers and end users, and involve users in quality assurance processes.
  2. Keep it simple
  3. Stick to the script
  4. Release early and often
  5. Let users, not developers, determine new features
Very good.

If you want to know more about Agile Development I suggest you:

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