Category: lessons

My First Agile Project, Part 1: Doing 80%

September 1, 2008 by mattgrommes

This is the first in a series of posts on what I've learned about how we're doing (and not doing, as I've learned) Scrum on a big project at my work. Going to the Agile2008 conference and reading Mike Cohn's Agile Estimating and Planning have really helped me understand how we got into the predicament we're now in, with a late project and diminished team credibility with our upper management. Hopefully our story will help other teams on their road to becoming Agile.

We were brought Scrum by the vendor of the new billing system we were integrating. They use it internally and taught us about the practices. Immediately, it was a hit. We all liked the iterations, taking on tasks, demos, etc. Except the day-long planning meetings (we were doing 4 week iterations and have ~10 people on the team so that's a lot of estimating and assigning) we liked the whole process. I had complaints very early about the seeming lack of involvement from upper management but we dismissed it at the time, thinking they would come on board later. I gave a presentation at one of the demos about Scrum, having been told that some of our senior management team would be there but they weren't. The project seemed like it was going along fine though, so we just kept going.