Matt O’ Rama

My First Agile Project: So It’s Come To This – The Year In Review

Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com.

Picture courtesy of Vegan Fellow on flickr

In the spirit of the season (Year-End Recap and Top 10 List season I mean), in this episode of My First Agile Project I’ll be going over the previous posts in the series and giving my comments. If you’ve read some of the series, keep reading for more you might like. And if you haven’t read any of my posts before, I’ve read some very kind things about the series on readers’ blogs so you don’t have to take my word for it when I say you will like it. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back guaranteed.

My First Agile Project Series

• Part 1: Doing 80%

This post was originally just for my personal blog and Artem liked it so he twittered me about possibly writing a series for this site. Don’t let anybody say Twitter or a personal blog is useless.

• Part 2: Inception & Planning

The first post I wrote specifically for a site other than my own, although the idea was part of what I was going to write about for my own blog. This was a nerve-wracking one to do, for sure. I’ve been on the internet long enough to have seen my share of people attacking well-meaning writers. It’s one thing to write for my own blog, it’s another to write for a pretty well-trafficked professional site.

• Part 3: Viral Videos and Bad Jokes in Scrum Demos

This is the first post where I tried to do a little better with the title. I want to entice people into reading but not be too cute about it. I try to keep my rambling down to a minimum with the posts to ASD as opposed to my own blog but this one is still a little all over the place.

• Part 4: How to lose credibility and jeopardize your project with lack of management buy-in

I went a little over board on the title on this one. Whenever I see it I think of Tyler Durden from Fight Club “How’s that working out for you, being clever?” I like the post though and this is my favorite image I’ve used on a post.

• Part 5: Our Top 5 Agile Mistakes

I think this is my most read post. Everybody loves lists and apparently everybody also loves reading about other people’s mistakes.

• Part 6: The First End of Our Project

This one was hard to write. At the time of writing we were heading into a stressful period of hoping we could get the project done by our newest deadline (we didn’t) so thinking back on the first time we missed our deadline wasn’t easy. It’s never easy writing about missing commitments.

• Part 7: Adventures in Agile Testing

My second favorite image I’ve used. I think this post turned out pretty well too, my rambling was kept to a minimum and I got the point across. I probably edited this one more than any other since there was so much I wanted to talk about.

• Part 8: 9 Things We Disliked (and Liked) about ScrumWorks

My most heavily commented article by far. I thought that might happen since everybody likes talking about tools. This was probably my most controversial post too since I was talking about an older version of the product but the series is about my team’s experience, not about reviewing tools so I’m okay with it.

• Part 9: Choosing A New Tool – VersionOne

I thought this one would be popular too and it was, but not to the level of the Scrumworks one since it was mostly positive. I’d actually started out to do both Scrumworks and V1 in one post but ended up writing 1000 words on Scrumworks alone and split it up.

• Part 10: 5 Important Issues For Teams

This is one of my favorite posts. I love working with my team and it’ll be hard to go to work anywhere else where the team isn’t as cohesive and friendly.

I like using stories and connections from other disciplines or fields to make points. This story is one of my favorites too since it’s such a big thing and has such strong parallels to programming.

I felt like I really had my rambling tendencies under control the best in this one. I liked writing about this topic since I’ve thought a lot about it beforehand. I always thought our retrospectives were super valuable but could have been better.

This was my first attempt to use our past experience to look at something in the news and I liked how it turned out. I didn’t just want to do my thoughts on the mini-controversy, I wanted to see if our history had anything to say on the matter and I think it does.

This post is why it pays to read comments. I got this idea from some comments on Part 13 and it worked out well. Since I’m not a professional writer sometimes thinking up what to write each time is the hardest part.

And that brings us to today. My First Agile Project, both the series and the real-life project, are taking a break until the new year. When we return to work in January we’re going to be starting crunch time in preparation for going live near the end of the month. The series is going to become a real time look at how we’re doing going live, then hopefully we’ll transition to looking at how our team goes from one project to a multi-project Agile team. I think it’ll be a good time both in my life and in terms of reading about it so stay tuned.

I’d like to sincerely thank any and all who read even one of my posts on ASD. I’m not a professional so being able to do this for the first time on a site with such a great and smart audience has been a treat. And super thanks to Artem, the editor of the site. My last bit of insider information will be to admit that I’m always late turning in my article and Artem has always been way better about it than he has to be. I promise I’m going to get my act together in the new year Artem! :)

Thanks again and stay tuned! Have a great holiday season and new year everybody!

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