As I head into the new year, I’m starting a new role as a Director of App Dev for agile projects. If you’ve been following along, you should know that I’ve developed a passion for agile, scrum & xp practices. Moving out of architecture was a tough decision, but I couldn’t push the engineering teams toward xp & tdd from outside the org.
So, to my friends, peers & mentors, what advice do you have for me? What land mines should I watch out for?
If you wonder why I’m posting to a blog instead of Facebook, I’m keeping work & social networks separate. LinkedIn, which connects to my blog, is for work & Facebook/Google+ is for friends. I think mixing work associates into my friend network isn’t a good idea.
Have a Merry Christmas! Hope you can enjoy time with friends & family.
First, congratulations on re-acquiring the highly-coveted Director title. I know what a bum deal it was to lose it due to budgetary/office political reasons.
Next, I think you need to make sure you don’t try Agile-ize everything. Knowing well the development lifecycle for most products at that company lasts a total of 5-6 months, Agile methodologies are an excellent fit for that. However, my opinion is that anything that is sufficiently complex enough to warrant a > 1yr development phase owes itself a gratuitous helping of Waterfall, at least in the beginning — and not including IT.
Hear me out on this. It’s been my experience (there and elsewhere), that when a project comes on that seems to have a “long” development phase, the elephant in the room is that the business process itself is either non-existent, ill-defined or wildly inconsistent (think first year FIN). A small army of non-IT BAs should be working with the business to define these sufficiently so that there *is* something IT can latch onto and put an Agile project around.
Does that make sense? The problem I’ve seen in the past is when those business processes are borked, the technical team(s) wind up in all these meetings to try to untagle and properly define the project — looking like Waterfall, wasting a decent amount of developer time, and, ultimately, because of the instant large number of stakeholders, the project goes into “analysis paralysis”.
The TL;DR Cliff’s Notes version: be wary of projects hoping to be Agile that have no business definition whatsoever.