Telco Standards and Agile!
Category : Pulse
Two weeks ago I went to Prague to meet a customer during the IETF 93 meeting.
I decided to travel by train (great mistake!) and took the book “Agile! the Good, the Hype and the Ugly”. It made a great reading for the trip.
The book covers agile software development methodologies and analyzes what is good from them and what is simply not good. There is a lot of fanatism on agile, particularly around Scrum. I do not have enough diverse experiences to have an opinion so it was interesting to read what someone else had to say.
Summarized, the author praises testing and short delivery cycles but also likes requirement gathering and analysis (which is often dismissed by agilists) and a design upfront previous to starting to code. Instead a fanatic Agilist only believes in Coding and Testing and providing something to the user to receive feedback and dismisses requirement gathering and upfront design.
I wonder if it is possible to make an analogy between telco standards and software development like this:
|
Software Development |
Standards |
3GPP |
IETF |
|
Requirement gathering |
Requirements |
Stage 1 |
Mostly Informational |
|
Big Upfront Design |
Architectures |
Stage 2 |
Informational or Standards Track |
|
Coding / Testing |
Implementations / Protocols |
Stage 3 |
Standards Track |
Looking at the table I think the effect of short development cycles and Open Source shifts focus also in standards away from the requirements and architectures into protocols. So standardization is also becoming Agile.
I admit I have never liked Stage 1 3GPP specifications and although I do like some of the IETF requirements RFCs, I dislike the fact that Informational and Standards look so similar (there is an RFC about this!). More or less the same feelings with Stage 2 where someone has agreed about a great architecture that may actually later never be implemented like it was conceived.
I do believe Stage 3 and protocols bits and bytes are necessary to grant interoperability which is something the industry should not give up. But in some areas (of 3GPP) there is little pragmatism. And while I like that there are standards for the web and radio access, I am uncertain if everything else will be there for long.
Overall my bet is that Software-Defined-Everything, Agile development cycles and Open Source (e.g. in the NFV/SDN context) must have an influence into standardization. Some of the big actors do not care (and de-facto boycott) standards (e.g. WebRTC). There are also areas where we do not seem to need full standards for interoperability (e.g. REST is not a standard and has some
enemies but it has quite a lot of success).
In general the seconds handle seems to be pressing and there is no time for the lengthy standards cycles anymore, maybe we should focus on what is relevant and embrace freedom elsewhere.
The picture is of Prague from Moyan Brenn with Creative Commons license