My previous workplace did classic Waterfall, which meant coming on and going to spec review meetings while waiting for the final green light to start coding. And I came on just before development was due to ramp up - in this case, about 6 weeks.
That was 6 weeks of reading elaborately crafted specs set out in a systematic way, and occasionally going to long tedious meetings where minor details were argued over. All this for what turned out to be a few weeks of actual development, before the long wait for testing to be complete and into production.
By the time I left, we were a few months into the design phase for the next project, with coding due to start just as soon as the specs were signed off.
The place I entered had just started taking on an Agile scrum methodology in software development. In the space of a month, I had gone to arguing over the minutiae of 100 page specifications to being asked to size stories based off a two line description and 5 minutes of discussion among the team. It was quite the culture shock!
It took a few sprints, but we slowly established a good team working ethic. When I came on, there was pessimism about whether the agile process could deliver anything other than more process for us to follow. But over the next 6 sprints, we made it work and got a high quality product out on time and with a good working relationship between business and IT.
So that brings me to where I am now. I've come out the other side of a scrum agile project as a scrum master for another. That means taking on a lot more of the organisational side of things, and consequently having a lot less time doing actual development. And it's meant spending time working out how to integrate the tools we have seamlessly into our workflow.
The way I see this blog is this - it's a way to collect my thoughts on the agile process as a whole. To write out some of the things I'm learning as I'm learning them, and to reflect on the practical realities of agile software development as I see it. I've been happy to wear the developer hat for close to a decade now, so will be an interesting journey for me to be immersed in a different aspect of the process.
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