Close on the heals of completing an Agile project as a PM I took upon a challenge of coaching a new team on their project.
What came out of that exercise are very interesting observations on the Agile methodology and the possibilities that it throws up to validate your mental map of Agile based software development.
- One thing as a coach I realized was that, I somehow had the detached feeling towards a project and it started giving me meaningful insights on the project.
- The first thing I went about doing, was to volunteer to organize the Retrospective the team was having. This gave me a complete 3rd person view to the problems and issues that the team was facing and it served to be a great place to get started. Also being an outsider to the team ensures that you can ask basic fundamental questions and still getaway from that.
- With the retrospective done, it gave us a couple of quick wins that we could go after. For example: why doesn’t the team respond in time to build failures. Though the need for a prominent visual indicator was felt, there was some coaching to do around the importance of responding back to build failures. More importantly, the Retrospective did show up issues on the technical approaches and on the throughput.
- As a next logical step we looked at the throughput and it was clear that the technical challenges were preventing from the team clocking velocity. Also we did ensure that the team did not move on to other stories, thereby increasing the current Work In progress. At this point of time the team is still spiking out a few approaches to set the ball in motion.
- Engineering Practices, CI & Test driven development are two pillars of an Incremental development project. The team was practicing TDD but without a CI tool it becomes difficult to setup a regression suite and compute code coverage. We setup HUDSON and provided clear visual and audio cues to indicate Build failures as a first step.
At the end of the day one dominant theme that stayed back with me – “What is the throughput and what are we doing about it?“
And What about the the engineering practices supporting this bigger theme?
These aren’t exhaustive in any way, but I hope to put them all together in one shape at the end of this project.
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