Things that go Wump in the Night..

Agile? Love it. Much talk about agile is how it helps deliver things to the client, but I want to talk about how it fits into work habits.

I think in layers

I like to sneak up on the end solution in stages, and agile works with that just fine. I’m also more of a “beginning” person who gets lost a little in the “middle” and sometimes finds it hard to say “finished”, so the definition of tight stories, each of which has it’s own start, middle and end works well.

I race to the finish

Iterations allow me to pull that race-to-the-finish energy out of somewhere. That’s a good thing. Typically I personally do about 50% of the work in the last 33% of the available time, so when the available time is 90 days, the last 30 are miserable. Breaking the project up into iterations has really made life better, and the overall project less stress free. If you are “plodder” this may mean nothing - but for us who for some reason leave everything until the last minute, the more last minutes there are in a project the better.

I like ticking boxes

Although I DON’T like writing stories, test cases and tasks, I DO like ticking a box that says “Done”. It feels good, especially in a team environment.

I don’t like the available tools

Now the not so great news. In my current project, what worked really well was sticky notes, and paper stuck on the wall - but it’s hard to deliver status reports from that to a client. We have a company account for an agile online tool, and eventually the job of maintaining paper and this system became too much. To a certain extent, the visibility of the big picture of the project, and that at-a-glance notion of how things were going was lost.

What I want from a tool is:

• Visibility
• Ease of use
• Minimalism
• Layers of functionality - so I can pick and choose how deep I want to go

.. so I’m going to build it.