Lately, one of our shop’s foundation software products has been showing definite signs of decay (a terrible case of broken windows that is). It’s this bad that even management concluded that we could start developing from scratch a brand new version. All the while maintaining and upgrading the current package as it is. Monday, development on the new version starts and I somehow obtained responsibility to oversee the actual development. This is actually a role I’ve long desired and now I have the chance to prove that I’m up to the task. Unfortunately, I was not very prepared for this twist of fate but now that I have it I will not let go of it very easily.
I already have supplied a solid foundation by pressing upon Scrum as a proces control mechanism. This should provide (us) developers with a solid target and at the same time allow for the necessary creative freedom. Because Scrum is a lightweight method we found no difficulties in agreeing to follow its rules. Monday we’re starting our first sprint aftwer we decide which part of the backlog we’re going to do first.
The team that’s maintaining the old version of the product is not directly involved with development and to be frank this only increases the chances of our team’s succes. I like my collegues very much but some of these characters are turning out to be pretty resiliant against new ways to think about development.
Sorry but I have to sidestep for a moment here.
Today, me and my collegue found ourselves alone with the project leader of one of our current projects. My collegue asked my client if he could explain, in short, what his proces was all about. Fearing the wrong answer, I quickly added that we were mainly interrested in the actual goal rather than the way it was implemented. Failing to come up with something decent I showed him my version: exactly one sentence that fully stated, but nothing more, the mission of our clients proces. Something that I wrote up the night before. A short moment of silence followed before he asked: “could you mail me that please”. Yeah! Shock and awe baby! Or, like Phoenix Wright would say: “Objection!!! This client clearly doesn’t understand it’s own proces! Luckely I’m here to clarify things for him, your Honour”.
Ok, back to business.
So today I’ve added some backlog and monday we make our first selection. I do not doubt there will be a lot of questions so I guess that there will be a whole lot of backlog items to add monday. I “politely refused” to be the scrum master but I think I’m going to ask to be it because I feel like it anyway.