Category Archives: Agile

Agile processes and related things.

Some Thoughts on Agile

I’ve done some development in an agile/scrum environment. There are a number of things it brings to the table that I see improving code quality in some ways and providing a more stable delivery schedule.

With all that being said, I don’t believe it is a silver bullet and I become a bit annoyed when I read books and articles that present it that way. I’ve been doing some refresher reading lately as we’re working with customers who run agile teams here and I’d like to help our team adopt useful bits of agile without harming our overall effectiveness. This is particularly challenging in a regulated environment like the medical device development we do here. It is also challenging when we’re doing contract development engineering and customers expect to have a contract that covers the work we’ll do before they start paying.

Stand-up

I’ve been running some sort of daily stand-up long before I heard of agile or scrum. If anything, scrum environments seem to make stand-up longer and more formal. In lead roles before I hit scrum environments, my stand-up usually involved going to wherever the bulk of the team was located (if I wasn’t already there…jobs varied) and having a short discussion with members of the team about how things were going.

One aspect of stand-up that I don’t endorse is the ‘blockers’ question that usually seems to be a rote part of the process. In a team of under ten people, there should never be blocking issues that last for more than a very short time. If you know who can help you then just ask (by email if they’re not immediately present). If you don’t know who to ask then either ask your lead or ask someone else and follow it up from there. If someone consistently fails to help those who need assistance then the team needs to stage an intervention and make it clear that we work as a team.

Blocking issues should never persist for long enough to make it to stand-up.

I also tend to use stand-up as a platform to address team wide issues and support issues that people encounter. Another side-effect of the ‘keep it short’ philosophy of scrum stand-ups are ‘information free’ comments. Telling the team that you’ve closed issues/stories ‘1123 and 1127’ and are starting work on ‘1134’ doesn’t really help to share information with the team. It may help the leadership track progress, but they have plenty of tools to do that already if you’re using any sort of software to manage work-flow.

I think this is enough for one day…I’ll add comments in another page in the near future…

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