Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Today marks the end of the first week of Agility at drop.io!

One week earlier…

Every Tuesday we start the day with a full-team meeting which we call a scrum (though it’s not quite a real scrum meeting). At last week’s scrum, Sam and Jacob introduced our new development practices:

• We operate in two-week cycles (or iterations).
• There are four areas of development to work on.
• Each cycle is dedicated to working on one of the four areas.
• Stories are written on the board.
• To claim a story, a developer puts their name next to it.
• When a story is complete, it’s erased and put on a piece of paper, which is taped to the “Ready for Staging” area.
• When a story is deployed to staging, it’s moved to “Staging”.
• When everything in staging has passed QA, we can deploy to production.
• When a story is deployed to production, it’s moved to the production wall.

That’s about it. Now there’s a lot about Agile that’s not here. There’s no story estimation. There’s no iteration planning. Stories can be added mid-iteration (and often are). The product owner role is almost non-existent. The developers implement stories in the order they choose.

But it’s a start. Even this much is a huge change for us, and a very welcome one. It’ll be a while before we’re comfortable enough to wade further in, and I’m ok with that. We’re learning every day about how to make this work.

We’ve included the most important element of Agile development, however: regular retrospectives. As long as you review your process and your progress regularly (and honestly), it’s hard to go wrong. Over the next few months I expect we’ll rapidly adopt even better practices for our team as we discover what those are.

Next week I’ll write up how our first retrospective goes.