Collaboration is what makes development fun. We’ve interacted more in a day than we would in weeks as maintenance devs.
Light Bulb Moments
Ever have one of those moments with Agile when you realized the effect it would have on you, your team, or your organization? Now’s your chance to share this experience with others so that they might learn from your story or even envision themselves in the story you tell.
October 28, 2002, the light bulb went on. Prior to that, I’d been quite content to suffer creating software in silence.
I had been chatting with these cool people doing this cool stuff and that's what it was.... cool but not that valuable when....
Agile seemed very chaotic to me and I couldn't understand why any company would work that way.
We all made attempts to reason with the customer...to no avail.
I realized that the team was not taking ownership of the work. I was. I had to let go.
My aha moment came in the first minutes of the class with the count-your-steps exercise.
Federal agencies by nature are not agile!
I was very uncomfortable with my role... I always thought I wasn't "doing enough" on the team.
Agile has many values but by far the most important to me was learning about people.
I suggested, given that I was new to Java, that I work hands-on the keyboard and my colleague watch me to ensure I was doing OK. We wrote some code, which gave us ideas about the design, which took us back to the code, which helped refine the design, etc., all the while discussing what we were doing.
Our first Agile project had a lot of things wrong with it...
Agile won respect and recognition that the 'old' way of dumping crap on IT and then blaming them for customer problems was over.
My light bulb moment came years later...
My initial reactions were: first, be more assertive - “YOU MUST DO THIS!”. When that didn’t work: “I am a failure, perhaps I am not cut out for this”.
(We) had an 8 month window for work that, in the Gantt chart, showed to be 2+ years.
After a huge implementation that had architecture, hardware, software and tons of training, our customer said to us - Thank you!
The problems were observed early in the process because we actually showed the customer what they would be receiving.
I started reading about agile like crazy... actually started with Sanjiv Augustine's book and Mary Poppendieck's book on Lean.
My first three Scrum teams--the ones that truly scared the bejeezus out of me--will forever remain in my heart as the kind people who taught me the tough lessons of letting go.
Agile software development gave me hope that I could finally bring something to the teams that I fully believed would make their lives, teams and projects better.