An Agile Preface

The company had already touted the virtues of iterative development and automated unit testing. However, the implementation of these practices was sporadic at best and nonexistent at worst. Iterations were thinly veiled waterfall practices with documentation updates starting to occupy large chucks of the iteration. Unit testing fared no better with only a couple of developers actually writing tests.

To start things off we decided to revamp the document templates looking to see which parts were actually useful and chucking the rest. Next we put together a series of training sessions on writing unit test, including some time by the QA department on what makes a good test. The final and most major change was to reorganize the development teams and their managers into one team with the previous managers being team (project) leads and a single PM. With this change we also changed the iterations to line up on the same monthly cycle.

With these major changes out of the way we were ready to tackle our first agile project. It was decided to collect the ex-managers together as the first team to lead by example on a high profile project. One of the major outstanding questions at this point was how to integrate the QA department into the agile processes since they had a huge backlog from the previous "throw it over the wall" style development. Additionally we had the challenge of binging the rest of the development staff along with us as we moved forward.