So it’s early January and I’m fast approaching the end of my 3 month probation at my new company. It’s been a great start to my step up to Chief Developer and despite being very challenging it’s been a lot of fun.
Hence why I haven’t written anywhere near as many blog posts as I would have liked – I’ve been way too busy actually implementing agile and simply haven’t found the time to write up what I’ve been doing. But in a nutshell we’ve:
- introduced retrospectives to understand better the areas we can improve
- agreed with the business to introduce fixed 2 week iterations (starting next week)
- split our original larger development team (10) into 2 smaller teams to promote better code ownership and provide less context switching
- relocated the team members and QA slightly within the space to improve communication across the teams
- cleared up our storyboards to reflect the new team structure
- improved our user story writing and given more focus to writing acceptance criteria
- taken steps towards writing automated regression and acceptance tests
- simplified our source control strategy
- introduced unit testing – specifically TDD with TestDriven.Net & Resharper templates
- built a new TeamCity continuous integration server
- introduced lunchtime learning sessions to improve everybody’s skill sets by sharing best practices
So we’re making small steps down the agile road and I think 2010 is going to be a pretty exciting year for us. We’ve got a lot of exciting plans and a lot of drive to see them through so we’ll see how things go.
I will attempt to post more often on here about the specific practices we’re using and I have in fact got 4 posts already in draft which I simply haven’t finished yet so I’ll endeavour to get those out before the end of the month.
But until next time…
Tags: Agile retrospectives, Continuous Integration, Implementing Agile, iteration, TDD, TeamCity
