I was brought into an "agile" project after having been through many "six sigma lean" projects. This is what I was promised:
1. Stories that define the development, with specific tests to verify success/completion. 2. A well maintained priority list of this sprint's stories and beyond, that get reprioritized after each retrospective. 3. Short scrums. 4. A good way to track progress on a story. 5. A burn down chart that shows progress overall. 6. Unit tests that I can use to verify that my code works, and that I haven't broken anything. 7. A real retrospective, that talks about process improvements.
What I got was 1, hey, can you write down everything everyone does in their job functions as "user stories", but I've never done their jobs? that doesn't matter! you can just muddle through and see if you can figure out their workflow from how the system should work! 2, Your priority today is X, no, wait, Y, no wait, Do both of them as fast as you can as we are behind on Q (which I had never heard of) 3, Our Scrum meetings were on the phone and lasted upwards of 2 hours. A complete waste of time for most of us, as we just had quick updates to talk about, but there were always people who wanted to talk in detail about every little thing they found....... I was surprised when I told one of my friends about our scrum meetings that they were supposed to be 5 minutes, standing up. 4, Our progress charts generally got left for last to update, so generally we'd go in and highlight everything green in one big spree 5, see 2, and 4, this generally was very badly managed. 6, I wrote the testing protocols and ran them, my theory was use the scientific method to divine what had been build and how it worked, in doing so I found some seriously giant problems in the code and actually got the entire 3 year project scrapped because it was evident from my methodical testing that the updates (which were on top of bad, rotting code) would not in fact work. 7, This was by far the best part. I got to sit in on a meeting with the high ups and share how I felt the whole thing had gone. I'm still shocked no one was fired, including me.
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Date: 2014-02-05 09:55 pm (UTC)I was brought into an "agile" project after having been through many "six sigma lean" projects. This is what I was promised:
1. Stories that define the development, with specific tests to verify success/completion.
2. A well maintained priority list of this sprint's stories and beyond, that get reprioritized after each retrospective.
3. Short scrums.
4. A good way to track progress on a story.
5. A burn down chart that shows progress overall.
6. Unit tests that I can use to verify that my code works, and that I haven't broken anything.
7. A real retrospective, that talks about process improvements.
What I got was
1, hey, can you write down everything everyone does in their job functions as "user stories", but I've never done their jobs? that doesn't matter! you can just muddle through and see if you can figure out their workflow from how the system should work!
2, Your priority today is X, no, wait, Y, no wait, Do both of them as fast as you can as we are behind on Q (which I had never heard of)
3, Our Scrum meetings were on the phone and lasted upwards of 2 hours. A complete waste of time for most of us, as we just had quick updates to talk about, but there were always people who wanted to talk in detail about every little thing they found....... I was surprised when I told one of my friends about our scrum meetings that they were supposed to be 5 minutes, standing up.
4, Our progress charts generally got left for last to update, so generally we'd go in and highlight everything green in one big spree
5, see 2, and 4, this generally was very badly managed.
6, I wrote the testing protocols and ran them, my theory was use the scientific method to divine what had been build and how it worked, in doing so I found some seriously giant problems in the code and actually got the entire 3 year project scrapped because it was evident from my methodical testing that the updates (which were on top of bad, rotting code) would not in fact work.
7, This was by far the best part. I got to sit in on a meeting with the high ups and share how I felt the whole thing had gone. I'm still shocked no one was fired, including me.