2008-Jan-26 - Making it Agile
To avoid becoming more and more conservative in releasing our product, the executives ordered that we introduced Agile mentality, and made our software development AGILE!
Well, before that, we do not have any clue about what Agile is, neither we have a successful agile pilot team. So we, the development group, started whitehanded.
Does it mean shorter schedule, no documentation, less test...?
After a couple of weeks of study and discussion, we found some difficulties in implementing Agile process (maybe it's not called a process for Agile) from our engineers' point of view. And the top 3 are:
1. Instant face to face communication among all stakeholders are not possible.
Because we are a transnational company, and the stakehoders, i.e. marketing team, development team, sales, tech writers, decision making managers, etc. are locating through out the world in different time zones.
2. Lack of senior, experienced engineers.
All developers and QAs in our team have only 2~5 years software development experiences. And nobody have ever involved in an agile team.
3. Working model is not decided yet a new cycle of product development is on the road.
We have started our new version of product development, but how to work agile is still in discussion.
I will follow up what happen on our agile development in my coming blogs.
| 