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.