I have been working as a software consultant for more than 11 years. Because of that I am an eager supporter of lean principles and agile methods.
This project took place several years ago, way back when I still was coding, mostly for Oracle databases. The customer was in the financial sector and the IT department was quite immature and had basically no formal processes or methods at all, no written requirements and no version handling.
A bit frightening at first, but we (unknowingly) adopted an agile approach:
- We worked directly with the customer who sat almost beside us dictating the requirements without any filters.
- Code was king - as soon as we got an idea we coded it to get a feel of it and showed it to the customer.
- We didn’t document - the code was the documentation.
Looking back we actually followed the Agile Manifesto.
The result was that the development went at a tremendous speed. But having no process also meant problems of course. To mention a few:
- We didn’t have an exit criteria. I didn’t know when I was ready, which meant that I eventually ended up in a really boring phase of endless changes back and forth, making me finally leave the project.
- Maintenance of the system would be quite challenging.
- We were a small team, but if team size would grow I believe we would have ran into more problems.
I think that adopting an agile method like Scrum would have taken care of some of the problems and let us keep the development speed.
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Left by Jens Norin on April 7th, 2006