I have done agile development for many different projects, in different organizations. I have seen the software industry start leaning towards it more with web application development, even before any agile methodology was known broadly. I think it is natural because new online services or automation of existing ones had to be built and renewed so fast that we needed users and developers to collaborate frequently to fulfill the needs on time and perfectly. Then as all the tools that we use for software development evolved and became much better, we started seeing agile methodologies are more commonly used by development teams – more on the engineering side. The most common ones I have seen are Scrum and Kanban. I personally believe that companies such as Atlassian also helped in the process transition (By the way I also used other online systems, there are great alternative products, especially if you want to use them for personal projects – for free)
So that is the introduction but what is this article about: it is about sharing some working team settings from my own experience to give a clear idea of when it really helps. It should be noted that agile methodologies changed and improved a lot in the last ten years, and practices became mature. However, it still needs improvement. Now scrum is the dominant methodology and I agree that it is somehow the best-suiting methodology for most teams but I don’t think is as perfect as it is advocated. The clearest issue that I see is almost no teams can practice it as a whole and the same way. Don’t worry it really helps a lot even if you have your own version of it that suits your organization and team. Methodology advocates don’t like people not obeying its rules but even if it is told that it is very easy with just a few pages of the guidance document, in the wild it is not that doable. I personally don’t care what I call it but strongly believe that modern software development should be done in an agile setting. Now let us move to the experiences, I will not give the organization names or project details but hopefully, it will be very clear what the methodology was like in each of them.
Details are to come in another post.
