Latest Blog Posts
Blog Archives
Dont go chasing waterfalls
Posted on Feb 15, 2012 | Tags: | Comments (0)
The low roar, the fine mist, the ray of sun: life by the waterfall seemed pretty good sometimes. As our project floats down the river away from the waterfall method, I thought I'd share the siren voices that it can be hard to resist.
When will we get there? I understand intellectually that agile has its own methods of predicting when work will be done, and that the evidence is pretty strong that this results in better results, quicker. But... There is something in me that misses my project plan showing a nice clean set of steps to a perfect product. Almost a project management Prozac! We're managing to do without for now.
Who does what? This is an area where we're finding our own way of doing things. In the small team that we have right now, the obvious people doing the obvious things on a nodded assumption is working quite well. As we grow the team, these will become less obvious, and the process of my colleagues choosing what they want to work on will get more and more important.
Where is my requirements doc? Similarly to my project plan, it would sometimes be nice to respond to a question with, "I refer you to section 6.4.5 of the spec, where we considered that exact point"! The most difficult thing here is setting aside one's ego enough to say "we don't know how best to do that, so we're going to try a few things and see which ones work best.
The river is running quicker now...
Ian Webster (@websterian)
Comments (0)