Crystal Methods - Wikiversity
Quoting:
"Crystal methods are a family of methodologies (the Crystal family) that were developed by Alistair Cockburn in the mid-1990s. The methods come from years of study and interviews of teams by Cockburn. Cockburn’s research showed that the teams he interviewed did not follow the formal methodologies yet they still delivered successful projects. The Crystal family is Cockburn’s way of cataloguing what they did that made the projects successful.
Crystal methods are considered and described as “lightweight methodologies”. The use of the word Crystal comes from the gemstone where, in software terms, the faces are a different view on the “underlying core” of principles and values. The faces are a representation of techniques, tools, standards, and roles.
Methodology, techniques, and policies are differentiated between by Cockburn:
- Methodology - set of elements (e.g. practices, tools)
- Techniques - skill areas (e.g. developing use cases)
- Policies - dictate organizational musts
Crystal methods are focused on:
- People
- Interaction
- Community
- Skills
- Talents
- Communications
Cockburn says that Process, while important, should be considered after the above as a secondary focus. The idea behind the Crystal Methods is that the teams involved in developing software would typically have varied skill and talent sets and so the Process element isn’t a major factor.
Since teams can go about similar tasks in different ways, the Crystal family of methodologies are very tolerant to this which makes the Crystal family one of the easiest agile methodologies to apply.
In his research, Cockburn [1999], he defines behaviour of people in teams:
- “People are communicating beings, doing best face-to-face, in person, with real-time question and answer.”
- “People have trouble acting consistently over time.”
- “People are highly variable, varying from day to day and place to place.”
- “People generally want to be good citizens, are good at looking around, taking initiative, and doing ‘whatever is needed’ to get the project to work.”
The points above are why Crystal methods are so flexible and why they avoid strict and rigid processes typically found in older methodologies."
There are several variants of the method and the set of methodologies is sometimes called "Crystal xx". For more details follow the lin k above.
