Agile GIS? Many would assert that’s a contradiction of terms. Not to Chris Spagnuolo, with whom I recently talked, and the leading evangelist for agile GIS. Chris is a manager at Data Transfer Solutions (DTS), a growing geospatial services spinout from Space Imaging, with headquarters in Orlando, Florida. Chris and some Ft. Collins cohorts, including Dave Bouwman (another agile evangelist), recently joined DTS and are developing customer solutions using the Microsoft .NET framework with ESRI’s development stack. Chris and the DTS development team adhere to the growing agile development philosophies, specifically Scrum.

Scrum is a rugby term for packs of players binding together for strategic advantage. Scrum is also a project management method that is growing in use for software development. Like much of agile, Scrum is not new, first described in an article in 1986. Its key traits are iteration and incremental progress. For a more complete explanation see Ken Schwaber’s paper “What is Scrum?“. Schwaber’s Advanced Development Methods, Inc. developed and used Scrum way back in the early 1990s. Today, some claim significant productivity increases using Scrum.

Back to Chris, who’s worked in GIS for more than a decade, in project and product management, some with ESRI. He spent time recently investigating agile practices for development and project management and began applying them to GIS projects. His blog, Chris Spagnulolo’s GeoScrum, provides ongoing commentary on his experiences using Scrum for GIS projects with DTS. The team is using Scrum for a project underway with the Colorado Department of Transportation and another with Tahoe Integrated Information Management System. All new DTS projects will apply Scrum from the start.

Chris told me that while he knows Scrum works on GIS projects because he’s seen it make a difference, clients have to be educated about the changed way of doing things. That clients can see product pieces every two weeks or so and the pace of change is rapid are foreign to those used to traditional project methodologies. The iterations and constant client review at the core of Scrum methods provide unprecedented visibility into the ongoing work.

Educating the GIS world on the benefits of Scrum is an ongoing challenge that Chris tackles with his blog as well as by working with agile proponents such as Rally Software Development Corp., an agile software development tool and services provider. With Rally, Chris can go after some tough customers such as government contractors used to fixed scope contracts that require additional presentations and seminars to understand how to contract for such projects.

While Chris promotes GeoScrum, he believes there is nothing particularly unique about GIS development and project management. All the reasons that agile and Scrum work on other projects in other markets apply here. But the GIS community, for whatever reason, seems a bit more traditional in its methods than many other sectors.

The buzz is loud around agile practices in the software development world. There are large conferences, books, Web sites, seminars, and agile-specific vendors. The big vendors in enterprise application development tools (Borland, Microsoft, IBM, BMC etc.) all have agile positions. For its part, ESRI recently hired a VP of Product Management touting his agile background. This is cause for optimism amongst agile proponents in GIS because where ESRI goes, many in GIS generally follow.

Where all of this will end up in GIS remains to be seen. But the benefits are now emerging often enough that GIS developers and project managers ought to be taking a close look at agile methods including Scrum. Short cycles and ongoing business involvement mean that Agile processes provide early warning as well as the ability to change course without too much pain during a project.

Meanwhile, while his methods may be new to GIS, Chris and the DTS team will continue to build proof for what he so strongly believes the old-fashioned way — one successful project at a time. (From left to right, the team is Mike Juniper, U.G. “Vish” Viswanath, Jeff Germain, Chris Spagnuolo, and Dave Bouwman.)