Crystal Methodologies

Crystal Methodologies is a family of methodologies developed by Alistair Cockburn. The word “Crystal” refers to the degree of hardness and the different colors of the methodology in much the same way that a crystal can have various degrees of hardness and variety of colors.  The degree of hardness pertains to the use of rigor and ceremony i.e. as the hardness increases the amount of required documentation, processes and procedures increases. The color is concerned with the “heaviness” of the project; the lighter the color the fewer the number of people on the project whereas the darker the color indicates the requirement for more resources.

There are two “core" elements of the Crystal philosophy.  The first core element is that software development can be viewed as a game of invention and communication with the main goal being to develop useful, working software.  The second element is the setup for the next game to follow. Members of the Crystal methods share values and principles and on-the-fly tuning. All of the Crystal methods are highly people and communication centric and recognize the varying human cultures.

The two rules that are common to all the Crystal methods are as follows:

1.      The project must use incremental development with increments of four months or less with a string preference of one to three months.

2.      The team must hold both pre- and post- reflection with a strong preference for mid-project reflection workshops.

One of the restrictions of the Crystal methods is that they only address collocated teams.  Thus, the Crystal methods would not apply to distributed or offshore teams for which Cockburn offers no recommendation other than to locate the team together at one location. 

As was previously mentioned the Crystal methods are denoted by colors. The color of the methods as follows: Clear, Yellow, Orange, Orange Web, Red, Magenta, and Blue. Only three of the methods – Crystal Clear, Orange and Orange Web - have been constructed and actually used on projects.