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These are the Agile and Lean frameworks from the Agile Practice Guide, from the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.

We’ve already looked at the core methods involving Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming and Feature Driven Development, and these are frameworks you’ll usually find at least one of in an Agile team.

But there are many auxiliary methods to Agile as well, and some of these will be scalable methods to scale across an enterprise or an organization, not just within one team. It can now be across business teams as well.

Now we’re going to look at Crystal as part of our auxiliary methods.

The Agile Framework of Crystal

Crystal was introduced by Alistair Cockburn in his book “Crystal Clear”, and it was created at IBM in 1991, long before the term Agile was even imagined. Crystal is an Agile framework now, and it’s focusing on individuals and their interactions. This is one of the core Agile principles, and doing this is opposed to (or more than) “processes and tools”. This is the first agile principle.

As it notes it is not a set process but it’s more of a guideline for team collaboration and communication. We’ve got three core beliefs – firstly:

Technologies change techniques.
As you’ve seen, depending on what technology you’re working on or what product you’re developing you may need to adjust the technique that you’re using to develop that.

Cultures change norms.
The culture of an organization will have an effect on the norms that you have within your team.

Distances change communication.
That’s why in an Agile team we recommend the “whole team approach” – all co-located in the one place so you can just look over your shoulder and say “hey Joe, can you help me with this?” instead of sending an email or making a telephone call and not getting a reply.

Crystal is designed to scale and it realizes that each project may require a slightly tailored set of practices based on its size and its complexity. It has a few core values and a few common properties. From a Crystal point of view its core values are focusing on people their interactions, the community, their skill sets, talents and communications.

Then the common properties are frequent delivery (very traditional for Agile), reflective improvement (think of your retrospectives – asking what went well, what didn’t go well, what still puzzles me, and what have I learned?) and putting that back into the process, improving every iteration of two to four weeks.

We’ve got close communication, so that’s the whole team approach – everyone in the same place, nice and easy. Personal safety, when you feel safe as a team it’s much easier to be to be honest about what’s going on and to make honest responses to the product or to the development cycle. It’s much easier to improve as well.

We’ve got focus and easy access to expert users – usually through the Product Owner from the whole team approach, someone who represents the customer or the customer themselves. We’ve got technical environment with automated tests, configuration management and frequent integration – that’s our continuous integration core practice within Agile as well.

So you can see why all of these things match up so closely with Agile and fit with it so well, even though it may not necessarily be one of the most core practices, its methodologies definitely are part of the core methodologies.

But Crystal is also designed to scale. We realize that each project may require a slightly tailored set of practices, and this is what it means. We’ve got the sizing framework within Crystal and it’s based on a few things – the life of the project, the money of the project, discretionary money and the comfort level of the project, and then the number of people involved. So maybe we’ve got only one to four people it’s nice and small, maybe there’s a lower level of money involved, maybe it’s a short project life cycle as well this is Crystal Clear. As you can see, it goes all the way up to Crystal Red just depending on the sizing of all of these things – the people, the money, the comfort level and the number of people involved and based on those you can size and scale up the Agile approaches. We’ll see we’ve got things like Scrum of Scrums and many other scaling frameworks that can be used in larger projects or scenarios.

And that is the Agile auxiliary method of Crystal.

– David McLachlan

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