Getting Agile
Its not often you’d get branded a pig or a chicken without taking offence, but in Agile terms you’re either one or the other. You’re either in the Scrum team getting your hands dirty, in which case you’re a pig, or looking in on the periphery keeping a close eye in which case you’re a chicken.
CODA 2go is the first project CODA has run using the Agile methodology Scrum. It’s a very different approach to the more traditional Waterfall model of software development often adopted at CODA.
The Scrum team itself is a multi-disciplinary team made up of designers, developers, testers, automated testers and documenters all working in close proximity. We have some very skilled people and a strong sense of ownership and team-working which really helps to drive the construction forward. The team as a whole, headed up by the Scrum master, make decisions on a day to day basis to make sure we can deliver what we’ve signed up to do.
It’s been quite a learning curve and a big adjustment to the way we work but I think the benefits really show. We were able to show off the end to end process of invoice generation through to printing at the end of the third sprint without the use of smoke and mirrors! The process somewhat de-risks a project by providing software early and iteratively. By giving it almost immediate visibility to the product owners the direction of the project can be continually reviewed and altered to meet the business needs.
We’re now 12 sprints in and we’ve designed, written, tested and documented some first class software and I think we can be proud of what we’ve achieved.
Tony Scott, Software Developer, CODA 2go. 8th May 2008.
