A Conversation About Surfacing Agile Methodology Results
A chat conversation I recently had with Todd Bradfute, our Lead Sales Engineer:
3:10:13 PM Todd: Where are we storing product requirement and feature enhancement design documents?
3:10:27 PM Frank: The most recent TestMaker 6.5 Design Document is a download from our Amazon S3 download server
3:11:05 PM Todd: Ok ... those make me nervous. Is there any audit-trail on them?
3:11:24 PM Frank: audit-trail?
3:11:45 PM Todd: If it changes will we know when it changed or why?
3:12:13 PM Todd: [I slip into my past project manager hat :-]
3:12:17 PM Frank: all the design documents begin with the disclaimer "May change"
3:12:34 PM Todd: Which is the most worrisome part of the design
3:12:44 PM Frank: yes and no
3:12:51 PM Frank: i see design as a conversation
3:13:08 PM Frank: i posted the design doc to our forums and invited feedback, criticisms
3:13:21 PM Todd: But at some point we have to nail down what we're doing and commit.
3:13:52 PM Todd: Ultimately I really want to see us adopt Agile as our development methodology.
3:14:18 PM Frank: 6.5 has a 6 week dev schedule. the committment will come in the next few days when Luis Carlos gives me a list of features to be developed and a schedule
3:14:40 PM Frank: how should we do it in an agile dev methodology?
3:15:10 PM Todd: We would have a backlog and take features into sprints in chunks.
3:15:31 PM Todd: Once we start the iteration the stories we're working on are frozen.
3:15:43 PM Frank: Our Redmine instance has a backlog feature, haven't used it yet
3:15:59 PM Todd: If we learn something during that period that changes it, the dev team finishes what they were doing and then we talk about whether changing that for the next sprint is the right thign to do.
3:16:36 PM Todd: The prioritized backlog is the main world of the "Product Owner"
3:17:01 PM Todd: Once the dev team gets to the product planning phase they take the top <n> items (as determined by their velocity).
3:17:28 PM Frank: ok, we've been doing that
3:17:40 PM Frank: just not with Redmine
3:17:56 PM Todd: Do we have defined sprints?
3:18:05 PM Todd: I would love to see us spend our 6 week schedule as 3 2-week sprints.
3:18:42 PM Todd: At the end of 2 weeks the dev team would do a demo. If anything is out-of-whack we'd fix it for the subsequent sprint.
3:18:56 PM Todd: Presumably it's not and we'd take the next set of priorities from the backlog.
3:19:09 PM Frank: We're doing that already
3:19:33 PM Frank: I've had the team split into 3: reports, enhanced controller, resoure repository
3:20:04 PM Todd: Those are the 3 sprints? Or there are 3 dev teams?
3:20:31 PM Frank: The most recent reports sprint ended today with tomas demo'ing his work. Tonight i'll give him feedback to work on the final sprint, then we're into 6.5 release
3:22:34 PM Todd: So it sounds like the biggest thing we're lacking is visibility.
3:22:53 PM Frank: yes!
3:22:56 PM Todd: I see the design, but I don't see user stories. And I don't know what the team is working on in which order.
3:23:03 PM Todd: And, of course, automated testing
3:23:08 PM Frank: the Forums software on Joomla seems designed to hide things
3:23:11 PM Frank: ugh!
3:23:27 PM Frank: We have some automated testing - regression tests run as part of the ci builds
3:23:34 PM Todd: Sigh ... I wish we could use Rally ... or even ScrumWorks.
3:23:59 PM Frank: Why not?
3:24:03 PM Frank: I'm ready to move
3:24:16 PM Todd: Sounds good to me!
I would love to hear your ideas to make our Agile process better.
-Frank