Q4 - What has been your
least satisfying Agile experience?
My last full-time software
development job before I wrote the first book was underwhelming. I had a
couple of great co-workers, but our development process was... ambitious and
underwhelming at the same time. We used a mixture of Scrum and XP where
we dutifully broke up all of our work into stories and engineering tasks,
estimated the necessary work, let our tests drive our design and refactoring,
and did pretty well at all of the development practices. (I wish we'd
paired more, but....)
The problem was that it was a very small consulting shop with lots of different
small customers to satisfy, so we'd work on multiple projects every week.
We did have a single grand project to work on, but only when we had had
enough billable work for the month for us to spend time on a new product. Mostly
we lacked a grand cohesive vision for our work, at least one that could predict
what we should work on at a high-level on a weekly basis.
It wasn't an unpleasant experience -- I do remember favorably the experience of
customizing a F/OSS point of sale system to the point where our largest customer
could use it successfully in a month's time -- but it was unsatisfying because
we had to spend so much time just staying in business that we didn't have as
many opportunities to succeed at our business. Despite that, our software
quality improved dramatically and we were able to meet the needs of our
customers much better, thanks in part to much better development practices.
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