Agile Development, my first notes.

I can't help but to brag a little, I mean what's not to like? I once worked in a poor environment, I was an engineer with little room to design anything in the fixed waterfall we had before us. It is the same story, I am sure, that we have all heard echoing in our ears... Feedback is far too little, far too late. Change is slow and cumbersome. But it was even more than that for me, stresses were much higher among our teams, "Quality and Validation" was some strange place on the other side of this big fence that we heaved our software over time to time. People were guarded... very guarded, and at times dealing with other branches of our organization was all but combative. To make matters worse we were a diversified, co-located team of people who not less than two years ago were direct competitors of one another, and suddenly here we all are sitting across a meeting table. We were once three companies, now under one new Medical Diagnostics giant. G u a r d e d.

So what’s to brag about, you ask? Today we all packed up our cubicles, we moved into the conference room. Our cubicles and sterile white walls are disappearing. We’re moving into a new colorful Bull-pen design, improving our work environment. Our team has been practicing SCRUM for about a year now and we’re moving closer to being just awesome. We’ve got a great Product Owner; she’s a great driving force behind our Agile movement, and we’ve got Executive buy-in; at least in the immediate chain of command... more over I like my entire team. We respect and work well with eachother.

Some things we’ve learned out along the way:

We don’t like the use of VersionOne, perhaps it is just our implementation of it and the processes wrapped around it, but it’s a bit taxing to continuously use it for the daily scrum. We’re adapting a completely visual dashboard, with swim-lanes containing our sized tasks. We’ll still use VersionOne for the Big fuzzy picture, but once they’re in the sprint backlog they go all visual.

Our sprint demos need to be short and focused on the customer. We need to leave as much process as humanly possible out of the demo. We’ve really had to fight with this one. Our demos used to be horrific and boring and never ending. We were performing backlog item acceptance at the demos, thusly dragging the customer through the process of scrum rather than the demo of our product. Now we’ve been pushing to only demo items that have been accepted, and that have a direct effect on the customer. And, we now have one person who performs the demo, representing the team. We've found that jumping around from person to person, sharing desktop after desktop in live-meeting sessions only confused people and made it both hard to follow and was disruptive to the product's workflow.

REFLECT, REFLECT, and REFLECT; I cannot stress the importance of the Retrospective enough. I think things started moving for us when we got serious about our retrospectives, and started forcing our self to pick at least one actionable item to correct from each retrospective. We're delivering now, and the last project went exactly according to the team's projected date, which was based of the product backlog
. We earned a little trust with that. f o c u s.

We’re still a little weak in that we need to track our velocity better, we’ve not been doing good at maintaining the burn down chart, but I suspect this is because we need to work on flushing out some of our back-log items more, we’re not completely sizing all tasks before signing up for back log items, or they automagically grow. This is something that I find to be important and need help with, but we’re going to work on that, I'm thinking......planning poker. We've never truly used it as a tool to accomplish our sizing, with maybe a few exceptions,

Coaching helps, we’ve brought in two coaches and I have to say it has been energizing and positive in many ways. Dan Mezick and Don Blair have been great and our team has enjoyed their assistance, and has actually grown as a result.

I suppose that is all for now, but I am sure I will have many more notes to follow.
~jt