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First steps in Agile

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While Anne's on maternity leave, several guest bloggers are writing posts for her. This is a guest entry from Mike Lunt. Mike is a Sr. QA Manager for BMC Performance Manager with over 12 years of software life-cycle experience in both online and product-based software. At BMC, he is responsible for continuously improving the processes used to develop and deliver enterprise-level products in the systems management domain. Mike has been working with rapid development and Agile techniques for many years, both at BMC as well as several startups prior to BMC.

Be sure to also read Mike's Personal Blog, Continual Improvement at http://www.mikelunt.com/blog/.

If you’ve ever seen this graphical process progression chart for Agile you notice that many development organizations could easily claim to follow Agile practices, and they might be right. In fact, my days in the startup world always make me wonder why people think Agile practices are new; however, most of the readers of this post do not have the luxury of starting from scratch. If however, you are considering trying out some Agile practices, I would recommend starting with the following two:

Nightly builds of a fully installable package that can be handed over to QA for each build.
2 week iterations where the team commits to have certain customer value delivered within a 2 week timeframe. This value would ideally be demonstrable to a customer at the end of the iteration.

The beauty of these two steps is they don’t require any fancy SCRUM training or advanced knowledge of Agile practices. These two fundamental improvements could be thrown into any waterfall project with a solid commitment and understanding from the team that the benefits will pay off in the current release or the very next release.