Low Country Software Ramblings

Definitely the best line in the entire movie “A few good men“.  Robert Holler (via Simon Baker) has a hilarious spoof of that scene that will resonate with anyone doing software development, not just Agile.

This brought much levity to a week otherwise consumed with trying to frantically finish yet another PIC-based sensor.

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Long time readers might remember that our company decided to run an experiment to see if scrum-like principles could be applied to areas other than software engineering. The results are in, and while the experiment would not be deemed a success, I sure did learn a few things.

• Team members should have clear focus.
• Upper Management must buy into the concept with more than words.
• The team members need to see the benefits.
• A single blade of grass a grassroots movement does not make
• The facilitator should not go on vacation during the 1st month
• Going from nobody being in charge to no one being in charge is not progress!
• Teams should have a clear mandate and have a critical mass (more than 3 people!)
• A small company, where everyone has 5 roles is not the best place for agile processes.

We ended up hiring someone to oversee the operational aspects of the business, more in line with traditional project management. I believe this was the right decision for us. Your mileage may vary.

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Another interesting article by James Grenning: using tests to explore an API. This is such a great idea, I’m wondering why it’s not used all over! Write a bunch of small tests, to see how the API works, to learn the quirks, etc… Keep the tests. You can use them to validate the next release from the vendor works like you expect it to. Powerful idea indeed!

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We are doing something very interesting at work.  We make supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that measure anything from temperature & humidity to particle counts in clean rooms.   We design software for Windows and embedded processors. We also design and build hardware devices.  We typically provide a turnkey system to our clients, to meet their particular needs.

As we are a small company with limited resources, it is always a constant challenge to manage the software, hardware and ongoing customer installations projects.  What are we to do? Use agile for everything of course!

We had our first planning session last weeek.  Considering that the entire cross-functional team is new to agile, I would say it went very well.  The approach is foreign to most people in the organization, but all were excited about the project visibility and accountability the daily stand-up brings. The instant visibility the task board affords into the project status was also welcome.

The major issue I believe we will face is simply the sheer number of projects we have to manage.  We curently have over 12 projects, most of them customer focused, the rest software development.  We have decided on using scrum with a 2 week sprint.  I am certain we will make changes as we come to grip with the specifics of applying scrum to a non software development area.  I’ll post from time to time about our experience using Scrum for everything.
Exciting changes are afoot!

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Don’t you hate it when you open your mouth to pontificate and realize someone smarter than you has already done it better? There is a fantastic podcast with Nancy Van Schooenderwoert where she talks about introducing Extreme Programming to a new embedded project. Actually, the entire Agile Toolkit podcast series is fantastic.  It is “Inside the Actor’s Studio” of the agile world.

Getting back to Nancy V, some of the papers she wrote about XP and embedded development are available at Agile Rules. Highly recommended reading!

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