Having spoken some what in Tuesday’s post about how I loved working in small and creative companies, and that smaller is better, I thought today I would take some time to write about my experiences with Agile as a development and project management process over the last three years.
So the basic question: “Does it actually work?”
In short, the answer is maybe. In fact, I have no qualms about recommending Agile as a development and management process, but in choosing it to govern the rules and best practices of your work team you need to understand its best fit within the context of the size of your team and the type of projects you work on.
The great thing about Agile & Scrum as a means to an end, is that the process is malleable and allows you pick and chose the best parts of it, without having to stick to it with a religious dogma. In my experience, the bigger the team and/or project, the more likely it is that you will find it beneficial to implement the true structure that Agile provides more rigidly. Whilst working in a smaller team, daily scrums definitely enables you to keep up with one another, and deal with any possible blockers, the real benefits of convening sprint meetings are less apparent.
This marked difference really depends on the ability of the project manager to keep a 100% hands-on approach 100% of the time. The more you veer away from this possibility, or the more you add in layers and complexity to the actual project, the greater the divergence of methods. Of course rule Agile purists will balk at any talk of veering from the divined path of the process, but the fact is that most of us live in the real world and the process of development, by the time you overlay it on your team, is never so black and white.
Though Agile helps with the process of development and management it is not a panacea, that is to say that it doesn’t do the job for any one single individual within the team. It certainly won’t mask any ill or lax management, though it does help to keep light focused on the progressing needs of any individual project and its sub-projects, and provides the tools and means by which to keep things moving forward constantly, and in fact in previous roles and on larger teams I have reported back daily to the production manager, in person at the beginning of the day & online at 6pm, before heading off home.
Anything that adds intelligent and informed structure to the development process has to be a good thing and I would be the last to shirk away from such demands of a project manager and return to the good old days of Cowboy Coding. In that respect Agile is more than worth investigating for your team, if you are not following such principles already.
Relevant Links
Nothing Beats Working On A Small Team – Vincent Stinks http://vincentstinks.blogspot.com/2009/04/nothing-beats-working-in-small-team.html
Related Links
Agile Development Process – Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
Scrum Development – Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
Some interesting ideas on scrum and how to implement them, in English and other languages – http://scrum4you.wordpress.com/
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
No Comments so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.