Slowly going Agile (well more XP anyway)

A few weeks back I undertook a performance review (no don't worry, its an annual thing). In this review I was asked for my aspirations for the future within the company. My response was to be more agile. My manager initially looked at me as if I meant that I could bend over backwards and touch my nose with my left big toe. As I explained more and more about agile practices (and I am no way an expert, I am still learning about it myself), he became more and more interested, especially as I explained it is a good methodology for environments where there is constant change, which is definitely the organisation I am working in. I gave him a quick run down and demo of the Subversion and CC environment I have set up and explained the ideas behind TDD.

Well It looks as thought it may be going to the next level, I have been asked to give a demonstration to the rest of the IT department showing off the merits of source control  and continuous integration (currently I am the only developer practicing this even though I am constantly discussing it with my manager) with the aim of implementing it with the rest of the team. I don't want to enforce agile practices onto my fellow team members, that will have to come from management if they so decide. What I want to show is how it better suits our environment over waterfall methodology as has been practiced here over the past few years, and I plan on doing that in small steps starting with source control and CI. Anyway I don't yet know the date of this demonstration, but when I happens I will report back on the response and any outcome.

5 Comments

  • Thanks for article I shall wait for any news in this occasion, I liked your story.

  • Version control is not about "agile" is about necessity... Even the simpler projects can benefit for version control, medium ones (lets say more than one or two developers) **need** some sort of version control

  • @Jorge - You are right version control isn't part of Agile, but I would say it comes within the 12 practices of XP (Continuous Integration, Collective Code Ownership). In my understanding to become agile you have to practise XP and change your mind set to a degree to more follow the manifesto. I am in an environment that develops waterfall with no vc (except me), so to get more agile, I am trying to move my co-workers step by step starting with vc, then ci, through unit testing and refactoring to cover most if not all the 12 practices of xp. Then hopefully get them thinking in a more agile way. Small steps I am afraid, but gotta start somewhere.

  • Good luck! It is a long trip I can tell you, because I took sometime ago and changes take really time in organizations! It is a min shift and some persons are very reluctant to change in their habit. When you will add on top of what you descibe Scrum or something like that to manage your project, you will even see another level of challenges.

  • @Jason - I don't know about classes, but as for books, I started with Teach Yourself Extreme Programming in 24 Hours by Sams, some people diss these books, but I think they are great at getting to grips with a subject especialy with the terminology used. Also look at Test Driven Development by Kent Beck and Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler. A good list of books can be found at http://www.noop.nl/2008/06/top-100-best-software-engineering-books-ever.html
    I cannot recommend any of these Agile books as I haven't yet read them.
    The vast majority of what I have learnt from are resources on the web; I filter DotNetKicks for Subversion, Unit Testing and TDD to get the latest best links.

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