1. Adapt the process.
2. Balance competing stakeholder priorities.
3. Collaborate across teams.
4. Demonstrate value iteratively.
5. Elevate the level of abstraction.
6. Focus continuously on quality.

1. Develop software iteratively
2. Manage requirements (e.g. RequisitePro)
3. Use component-based architectures
4. Visually model software (e.g. Rose/XDE)
5. Verify software quality (e.g. Test Manager/Robot)
6. Control changes to software (e.g. ClearQuest, ClearCase)

While there is evidence of agile in all of their new practices from addition of adapt the process and collaboration, to the rewording of demonstrating value iteratively to balancing competing stakeholder priorities – in the details of each of these practices there are still some strong references to requirements, detailed use cases, design models, etc.

This indicates that IBM Rational is still focused on a unified process supporting both a highly adaptive and strongly predictive methods as appropriate. As a final note, IBM’s key initiative in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is evident in their Elevate the level of abstraction practice. It’s a good time to be in the software development industry as there are bound to be some exciting movement responses among the other top players like Borland, Telelogic, and our agile community.