Projects, Projects…..

I was reading Agile Software Development with Scrum last night and I couldn’t believe the common sense it made me realize. Sometimes you need a good swift roundhouse kick to the face before you get it. We in software development are always talking about “if anything can go wrong, it will” It’s completely unpredictable. Yet, we constantly try to apply these waterfall models where we design, design, design, define work breakdowns of defined inputs, expecting for the right outputs at the right times, and that is NEVER who it turns out.

We try to apply a predictable process to an unpredictable deliverable which is ever changing in requirements.

We must as software engineers adopt a more agile model just to deal with the very nature of what we are building.

Thoughts? I know no one reads this, but surprise me.

Listening to a podcast with Jared Richardson the author of “Ship It!” I actually own this book but have not read it yet. The biggest concepts he seems to focus on are continuous integration and test automation.  Knowing the state of your project at any given state is key and with those two things working, you will always know.

Parts of this conversation seem to be focused on Scrum principles. Daily meetings where you look at what you did today, what you will do tomorrow and what is standing in your way. The feature lists which are prioritized by a team lead and are the only things you are allowed to work on during any given iteration, sprint, etc.

All of this is starting to make real sense to me. I have not heard any anti-agilists. Just people who are resistant to change. We have our challenges in adapting it here. Should be interesting. More to come on this.

We're trying. Seriously we're trying. we do it under the radar and under the covers for the most part. We've even convinced the waterfallers that a phased beta approach is better. Let out features as they are ready. get early feedback and drive more requirements. Hmmm, what does that sound like? Don't tell anyone. It's working great so far. I just wish it didn't have to be done in this fashion. I wish someone would stand up and say "CHANGE NOW OR ELSE" and let us fall into the world of more releases and constant interaction with our customers. 

Some of the challenges we face I'm sure are normal. Our customers don't want to uproot their infrastructure every two months for a new release. We've tried to seperate out the application bits from the infrastructure pieces as we could at least go agile on those bits. It still seems to not be the way anyone wants to go. How do we ramp up training in time? How do we get through Export control, and every other process we have to go through before we ship? They are right. The current org does not scale to this method. 

Currently, I'm at a loss. I've ben mostly focused on the ideas I've heard about adopting agile methods on top of a waterfall process. Let the overall project stay waterfall, but do agile methods and release betas often to customers to drive a more interactive and fast-paced, innovative environment for my development staff.

We're just starting a lot of this now. More to come soon. Would love ideas!! 

Having difficulty in finding any good tools to use for Project Management on Linux. I have tried Planner in the SUSE Linux distro. I was recently shown a blog entry on Devshop http://www.devshop.com.

Any other tools out there worth my time and effort in trying them out? 

I find that my main job here as Project Manager is to make engineers talk to each other. They don't like that whole talking thing… I've been doing this job for 2 years now and it never ceases to amaze me how little people talk. Even when the problem is clearly in someone else's code or a fix will clearly have an impact on another team, zero communication occurs, and you end up in a stalemate or finding out about it after the fact. We have a very distributed team all over the world, but often this problem occurs between offices in the same building.  

 We quickly realized as we were embarking on many new projects per quarter that we needed to sych up more often. We now force a quick meeting with the managers every morning. Throughout the day I am constantly adding relevant people to email threads and IM conversations.  A simple question like "well, have you talk to so and so" always receives a shrug and a "I hadn't thought to do that."

The morning meeting works on a small scale but I clearly can't stop all developers from doing what they are doing every morning. So, how do I make people talk to one another. We tried an IRC experiment but no one seemed to want to log on. Viewed it as a distraction.
I'm pretty sure no one has found this blog yet, but if you do and you have ideas, I'm all ears.

Comunicate with me…

Corey Jackson

Project Manager