agile

Real World Agile

I’ve yet to hear a self-respecting engineering team boasting about using waterfall development. Nowadays, everyone claims to espouse at least some level of agility. However, few are able to articulate what their development process consists of.

There is a lack of information about how development is actually performed in software companies around the world. Often for good reasons; they don’t want you to know.
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Skype, Distributed Team Hero

Many of the Agile development practices are centered around human interactions. It’s only natural to ask the question: “How do you do Agile with a distributed team?”.

It is idealistic to think that team members will be together in the same location. The engineers might be working from home because the scrappy startup has no offices, or talent has to be found abroad because there is a shortage locally. Whatever the circumstances, it’s very likely that one or more member of the development team are going to be remote.
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Long Term Planning with Agile

Agile development methods are well suited to plan and execute near term releases¹. Those methods help us plan and steer a release over several iterations to reach completion with a good level of accuracy and repeatability. The rapid successive iterations that lead us there are akin to fast twitch muscles. They give you speed and tire quickly.

However, there are instances when the time horizon needs to be further out than the current cycle. The need to create a budget, synchronize a roadmap with a partner or determine future hiring needs, make it necessary to have an effective mechanism for long term planning. We need slow twitch engineering muscles that are good for endurance and can work over long period of time.
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Homegrown Agile Dashboard

This is a repost of a series of article I originally published for Songbird.

This is a following post to the series on Agile development at Songbird. As covered previously, I’ve created in-house tools to help with the planning and tracking of our release trains. The tool works off of Bugzilla and extracts meaningful information for project tracking. As it was originally meant to periodically generate an email status, it became apparent that it was too static for daily project tracking needs.
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Songbird's Path to Agility, Part III

This is a repost of a series of article I originally published for Songbird.

In the previous two installments of this series on Agile development at Songbird, I’ve covered our move from waterfall to Agile and provided an in-depth look at some actual release cycles. In this last post, I’m going to introduce a tool — which I gave the uninspiring name sdpbot — built internally to help facilitate the tracking of our releases.
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Songbird's Path to Agility, Part II

This is a repost of a series of article I originally published for Songbird.

Previously, I’ve examined the new development practices that the Songbird team adopted to plan and track a release. Everyone on the team was very eager to put them to the test. Unfortunately, at the time, we were still in the middle of the 0.3 release cycle and new work could only be started once that release was completed.

During the 0.3 release, everything was still treated as a bug, but in fact, many bugs were stories and tasks in disguise. We decided to apply some of the newly defined tracking principle to help us guide and finish the cycle, so we could start fresh with our next release as soon as possible.
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Songbird's Path to Agility, Part I

This is a repost of a series of article I originally published for Songbird.

This is the first post of a three part series presenting my experience moving the development of Songbird, a cross platform desktop media player from waterfall to an Agile process.
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