Nov 12

Adventures in Agile Development

Agile, Software Development Add comments

Last week I decided that I’ve read enough, been exposed to enough, and gotten as far as I can get with agile software development without actually doing it. So I went in to our senior management and shared my experiences from the past few development events with them and managed to convince them to try and adapt some agile practices into our development process. By bringing forth the pain points we have during development (unknown status, slipping deadlines, inaccurate estimates, excessive impact from changes, etc.), I started to explain how we could gain greater transparency to our development process using certain agile practices.

After a few preparation meetings and a lot more discussion I introduced story writing and planning poker to the group today. I haven’t gotten enough feedback yet, but we are going to continue fleshing out our first batch of stories to fill our product backlog. Once we’ve collected some stories, we’re going to estimate them to get some experience with the process. If all goes well, I expect we’ll start our first iteration next week.

I’m encouraged so far, but there is still a lot of work to be done.

2 Responses to “Adventures in Agile Development”

  1. Dave Says:
    November 12th, 2007 at 10:38 pm

    awesome! i’d be happy to help you guys w/ any issues from the gate. i recommend a) doing a demo and b) taking your time w/ the initial stories. they’re harder than they look! good luck and looking forward to hearing about your journey.

  2. Don Says:
    November 13th, 2007 at 1:06 pm

    The lack of feedback may be from the shock in the way the message was delivered. Telling the group that we will probably lose people over these changes and treating that like it is not a big deal was a huge mistake.

    Now, don’t get me wrong. I would love to see XP implemented within our development area, but the team needs to feel like this is being adapted to help with their issues rather than rammed down their throats, take it or leave it. They need to have the insurance that help will be available to make this a smooth transition. They need to feel that all concerns will be addressed and not tossed aside. The human factor needs to exist through the entire transition.

    I really hope the message was not lost with the hard fist tactics that were exhibited.