Stray Musings on the intersection of Technology, Domains, People & Process

There is waterfall and there is Agile; and how the twain shall meet.  Update : 18 Apr 2020 -  I have been holding back on this write up for the last few days as I was not sure it was fully 'done' yet. This for an article on iterative development - the irony is not lost on me; hope you see it too.  On reading through the Waterfall paper  in early 2012 on the recommendation of my team-mates, I had the chance to re-evaluate ideas of the sequential phased manner in which I developed at my earlier job. Illuminating as it was to find that the "waterfall" paper did not espouse a rigid one way progression of work in phases, it also sat right with the working experience we had developing within the "waterfall" methodology . Of course I could not find the original article but did find another blog article which elucidate the same thoughts in some detail ( see here ). As a team we had been practicing SCRUM  Agile since 2008. While the phases left us t...

Agile Metamorphosis Anti-patterns Over the years I have had the opportunity to observe the progression of Agile teams as they form, mature and eventually disband (yes, I have seen that happen too) due to natural evolution in technology and markets. Having revisited and mulled every impactful change over varying state of minds, seeking different answers at each visit has broadened my perspective on the changes a development leader needs to address as she / he attempts build and grow an Agile team – a goal certainly worthy of the effort. Setup of an Agile software development team is an endeavour unlike other domains. Certainly, the dynamics and challenges involved in software development work – no matter how mundane the problem space, are underappreciated (if at all) by most organizational leadership. This could be out of ignorance or a matter of convenient ignorance. The goal of this write up is to simply put in one place content which could help leaders (note the conspicuo...