Thoughts in the Wilderness

Well today we had our first retrospective, a day before the end of our first sprint.  I used the tried & true format of “What went well” followed by “what went not as well”.  We scheduled an hour for the meeting.

As usual, people had a lot of trouble coming up with positive things to say, and not much trouble coming up with negative   One person refused to write anything positive!

It came together pretty easily that the topic that concerned the most people was “requirements”, or rather the lack of them.  There was a fair bit of conversation, which could easily have got out of hand.  In fact, it did for a little bit when one person tried to hijack the meeting for a topic other than the one we agreed to talk about.  I redirected that to another 1-on-1 meeting between the 2 of us later.

I tried to keep it in front of everyone that we wanted to come up with concrete actions that could be used to address the problems.  This worked ok to keep the conversation on topic, but no-one really suggested any actions except for our manager.  Being that she is the manager, no-one was seemed ready to contradict her suggestions.  They were good enough action items though, so I went with the flow.

The organization is very document-centric, which bothers me.  Rather than talk about ways that the developers could *pull* requirements through 1-on-1 conversations, there were a lot of suggestions on how we could better use email and documents on SharePoint.  Ugh.  I’ll have to live with the document-centric viewpoint for a while I think.  The best I can probably hope for, short term, is to find ways to make the documents useful to the team.

In the end, we finished on time and came out with some actions that we are taking to address our requirements-concerns.  Nobody was insulted or put off, and the team is fairly positive.  I’m pretty happy with those results.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I have started a new job. My role is still unclear, but that doesn’t bother me at all – this way I can define my own role.

I’m working in a small team of web developers, trying to start on the next generation of the web portion of our core business product. The team was supposed to be Agile, but was decidedly *not*. I’m working on that, i.e. so far I’m defining myself as the Agile-guru.

We had our first planning meeting that I was allowed to run, and I went with my favorite planning tool (FreeMind). The team is very tool and framework oriented, so I think introducing the tool as part of the planning was less intimidating than if I had just gone at it with story cards.

My purpose in using FreeMind is to enable open discussion, and also to focus that discussion. It allows me to acknowledge everyone’s input, by reflecting it on the mind-map. The tree-like structure naturally allows everyone to be focused on the current area of discussion without being too distracted by other concerns. Once we have everything noted, then we can more effectively make estimates.

We had a very short estimating session. This was difficult, because individuals on the team seemed information-starved, i.e. they wanted to gather all of the requirements then and there. I tried with limited success to focus on just getting rough estimates. To keep it ultra-simple, I allowed only 4 time estimates: 1 day, 2 days, 5 days, or more (needs to be broken down further to estimate). As expected for a new Agile team, estimates were *very* ambitious, and we did not complete.

My final note is that it is interesting to be able to observe the team forming. I was the last member of the team to be hired, but before my joining, the others have barely interacted as far as I can tell. This means that we started in the “forming” stage of team evolution. This is characterised by the our manager being very hands-on, and directive. Basically, we are not a team so much as a set of individuals working under the co-ordination of a manager.

The next team-stage after forming is “storming”. This is a little stressful, and I hope we don’t lose any team members, or the confidence of our manager. I can already see some people coming out strongly on opposite sides of issues, and coming into conflict because of it.

Anyway, that’s my update. Wish me luck.

Sorry if the feeds are all messed up – I just moved my blog to my own hosting provider (it was hosted by blogger.com). I was fairly content with the blogger.com service, but I decided to scrap the website at www.perfectapi.com, and felt I needed something to put in its place. (So the blog will be the default website on my domain now).

Its been a while since my last post! Some of the reason is that I went on an intense 3 week job search, followed by a new job that I started on Monday. Its weird that I really enjoy interviews – but they did drain my energy levels substantially.

I’m still working as a senior software developer in a team environment (pretty much my goal for this job). I’ve been picking up a lot of new stuff, as the job involves getting back into the ASP.NET world that I had left behind a few years ago. My first task is to design and implement a new claims based (federated) security system that works across a multiple tiered application. Its fun, and I’m making good progress. Yay.

It is also interesting to be in a new environment that tries to be Agile, but is much more limited by environment than it was in my previous position. I hope I will be able to improve what they have started, but for now I have been just observing.

My biggest shock on the new job so far? Seeing VSS again, in active use. Ouch. Its a very Microsoft-centric shop, so at least they are looking at TFS.