A nimble leap (???) into Agile

We have started using some Agile techniques in the company, and although it has created a lot of work to set up the tools and processes, we are very impressed with the results.

We used to use our interpretation of the waterfall development process, but we were hitting some productivity, motivation and quality problems.  It came to head when a very important piece of new software (but to be fair it was very ambitious, it appears to be a world first in its modest little area!) did not achieve OK quality.  The architecture was “tired”, and it was time for a redesign, and a new approach.

So we had 2x projects, one was for architecture (it was an embeddable eComponent web framework) and one was for “things” (some eComponents that were built into the framework).  A couple of things that we observed were:-

• We were right not to combine architecture and “things” in thesame project, they have different natures
• It was really great for developers to see their results with a fortnight
• The old waterfall design phases were sending developers “stir crazy” they wanted to do “real stuff” like code
• We did not need to get into speculative discussions on some design decisions which could burn up lots of team time, as we could do it one way in the sprint, see how it looked, and what OUTSIDERS (aka reality) thought, and we could correct it in the next sprint

We have started developing lots of tools, and we have wondered if we could turn them into a little package that would be useful for other people who are getting started in this area.

So I hope to be posting some more things in the blog as we go, and very keen to hear about other people’s experiences, I will be hanging out the in the “linked in group” agile alliance.

Oh and we liked the method so much that we have decided to recruit an “Agile Pair” of programmers, more of that later.