I’ve been working at Integrum for nearly 5 months now. When I started, agile was a concept that I had read about, but never experienced in practice. I took bits and pieces of advice from books like Extreme Programming Explained and Practices of an Agile Developer but I had never really lived day-in day-out as a developer in an agile workplace. However, now that I’ve experienced the project boards, burn down charts, velocities and story workshops, I cannot imagine going back to the slam-your-head-against-the-wall waterfall approach from which I came.
What I Love
Project Boards – Nearly real-time visual feedback on the status of your project. Everyone on the team can assess your project at a glance and you can avoid long status meetings with middle management. Greatly increases accountability.
Stand-up Meetings – Quick, informative useful meetings that don’t waste people’s time. Social group pressure keeps people who like the sound of their own voice from talking for 30 minutes.
Daily Client Interaction – No need for ego-maniac project managers. Developers discuss issues with clients each day so that they can deliver the best software with the most value as quickly as possible. Challenges or roadblocks can be brought up almost immediately helping to prevent wasted time on either side of the equation.
User Stories – “Replacements for a conversation” as I always hear around the office. Replaces the need to confusing spec documents and misguided feature requests. These provide a way to ensure that neither the client’s money or developer’s time are being wasted.
Acceptance Criteria – It’s not easy getting quality acceptance criteria from your clients, but man is it worth it. Helps to make sure that what’s “done is done” and there are no disputes towards the end of the project about what is or is not completed.
Short Iterations – Allows the developer to focus on a set of the most important tasks for a short period of time. The client receives frequent demonstrations of the completed work and changes in course can be made very quickly. What was important 4 months ago during the original planning session might not be important this week.
Waterfall Development: DO NOT WANT!
Looking back on my last job where waterfall development was the norm, I can’t imagine how I got anything done. When I really think about it, I wonder how much software I wrote that was “right” the first time around.
Just as a quick list, here are some of the things I’ve grown to hate:
- Project manager dominated client interaction
- Long useless meetings
- Finger pointing and blaming and lack of accountability
- Waiting a few weeks to find out that your implementation is incorrect
- No way to tell what was actually “done”
- Wasteful spec documents
This Won’t Work For My Business
There are probably a lot of development shops that are humming along using long standing processes based on a waterfall model. A lot of people probably think that they don’t need to change because “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. If you’re not doing agile your shit is broke!
A lot of managers probably think that this system won’t work with their employees. I can see this being the case if any of the following apply:
- You don’t trust your employees
- Your employees are morons (or you think they are)
- You think you need to operate like the status quo
- You can’t give up your control on the process
- Your clients suck
Agile Works at Integrum
Derek Neighbors has taken the time to produce a couple of videos outlining how agile is put into action at Integrum:
Whatever the reason, agile works, like actually works, at Integrum. Is it the culture? The people? The atmosphere? The expectations? The clients? I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I can guarantee it’s not coincidental.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent write-up! Any clue why Agile is typically only seen in software/development companies? We were just talking about that over here at Forty.
Not sure why agile seems to only be popular with software companies. I think that’s the industry where it’s most understood, but it could certainly apply to many other industries with a similar “project” oriented work flow. However, the two biggest hurdles in the software industry seem to be laziness and the status quo. While laziness can probably be overcome in other industries, I think the status quo is probably too firmly rooted for any major players to begin adopting agile.
A better approach, that’s similar to agile, for other industries might be the “Getting Real”:https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ mentality, or at least the higher level parts of it.
Thanks for participating in the discussion.