Justin York – Simdesk

“Del's leadership was instrumental in bringing agile methodologies to our development team. While transitioning to scrum, I often consulted with Del about how to handle things in the scrum framework. Once our team was fully running on scrum, I felt that we were at least twice as productive as we had been in the past.”

Matt Willson – Pervasive Software

“As Delmar's manager for over a year, I was very impressed with the simplicity of his designs, the quality of his software, and the tenacity he brought to problem solving, especially customer issues. Delmar provided strong leadership for the developers who worked under his tutelage.”

Steve Mook – Pervasive Software and Simdesk

"Del is experienced,enthusiastic and tenacious - an excellent team lead with expertise in UI design and development and Scrum project management. He is willing to learn new technologies, challenge assumptions, take risks, and be accountable for results. His skill and leadership would benefit any team that seeks to improve its ability to deliver value to customers and to the business."

My Agile Experience

What was really exciting was to see the Scrum methodology adopted company wide at Simdesk. Because of the success of our team I was able to train and mentor other team leads, managers and corporate executives to use Scrum. This lead to increased productivity and better communication among the teams, support, product managers and upper management. Goals are well defined and consistently meet.

Tags

adoption architecture books build change collaboration deploy design integratoin learning management performing productivity quality release safety sprint team Team Member team safety training user stories

My Reading List

Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)) by Lyssa Adkins (Paperback - June 14, 2010)

Available on safaribooksonline.com as a Rough Cut.

Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum [Book] by Mike Cohn - Addison Wesley

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott

Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders - Paperback (Jan. 16, 2006) by Jean Tabaka

Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) Roman Pichler

Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt - Pragmatic Book Shelf

Mar
31

Working software in the first sprint

By Delmar Hager

We just finished our first sprint for a new feature. I have noticed that the initial sprint many times is very difficult because you do not have any code with which to start and the new feature is just written on paper.

A goal of Agile is that every sprint delivers working software. I know in the past that has been a real issue in the early sprints. How do you develop working software in three weeks?

The key to developing working software is to do figure out what is the scaffolding that needs to be in place to create a minimum working system. It is critical to understand what are the essential feature that are required for a working system. How much of the “happy path” can you “hard code” to create working software?

Defining what is essential is not easy. You have to take a look at your high level design and determine what is a working system that will be a true initial representation of the final product. What we build in this initial sprint will create the foundation for subsequent sprints.

I have found out that it is critical for the technical development lead to take leadership in this area. He or she, with the help of the team, can create the vision for this first sprint. Once this vision is established the team knows exactly what they are working toward. They can see how all of the pieces fit together to meet the goal of working software.

In the case of this sprint we had to create a vision that was not really a user story but was a overriding goal that we had on the white board in our team room. We could always point back to the vision for the sprint and see how we were doing. All team members agreed to the vision so this became a great unifying theme.

As the result of this vision for the sprint we came up with great sprint demo of a working feature. It provided the product owner and stake holders clear understanding of the functionality and how the feature will evolve in the future sprints.

Categories : Agile