The zAgile story begins much earlier than the encounter with members of the Fundación Chile in late September of 2006. It began after I had left IBM, in July of 2005, fifteen months following its acquisition of Trigo Technologies, a company where I had served as the VP of Engineering. Following this acquisition and transition and a rather long and grueling marathon that had led me through a number of fast-growth companies over the course of several years, I felt the need to pause and contemplate my next career moves.
I also felt the need to rediscover the passion that had driven me into this career in the first place.
The first step towards this process was to clear my head of any preconceptions and just read a lot, and read indiscriminately. I read about all kinds of topics, ranging from the laws of self-organization to the laws of software process. I was catching up on emerging trends as well as giving myself an opportunity to discover anything that could regenerate my passion. I spent several weeks reading day and night and slowly began to draw towards four emerging trends and related concepts:
- the success of open source and the business models that leveraged it,
- the technologies related to the semantic web,
- the ideas behind process/method construction in the software engineering domain (SPEM, OPF, etc.), and,
- the adoption of Agile methods within all shapes and sizes of companies across the globe.
The idea of capturing semantics (knowledge) associated with systems, processes, events and people (performers) seemed particularly very fascinating and to some extent a level above the data modeling paradigm of the 80s and object models of the 90s. I thought about ways to somehow apply this technology towards the capture of knowledge that is created throughout the software engineering lifecycle -- knowledge that ultimately is either dissipated or embedded within the software itself (as Philip Armour asserts in his book "The Laws of Software Process") -- but is not all too readily accessible to us. In all sorts of scenarios in software engineering, this has been one of the key problems in our ability to maintain efficient and predictable delivery cycles.
However, the semantic web technologies also seemed very nascent. With the exception of the vision behind Mozilla's original architecture, I couldn't see anything architecturally tangible in this area with respect to the application of these technologies to solve real-world problems. It wasn't so clear as to where and how one could effectively apply them.
At least not yet.
-Sanjiva
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