It’s never too late to go more agile.

Last week I met with Bill, a Visionpace associate, at the client’s location to go over the user story list and start tracking one week iterations. This fact that I met with Bill isn’t ground shaking but the reason for the meeting is blog worthy.  At least I think so. Bill has been successfully working with this client for the better part of two years without formally planning iterations.  So what prompted us to start formally tracking user stories, iterations and burn down? Put simply, we need the information that the Perfect Vision process provides.

Let me take a step back and provide some insight on the project. Bill has been working on the client developing a solution for working with insurance claims. They have been defining the work with user stories and using roughly defined iterations (not a specific duration, but defining work for a week or so based on the stories and their priorities.)  Visionpace has a couple of clients that this approach works for.  It takes a lot of participation and communication between the developer and the end user, and it doesn’t hurt that Bill, like the other Visionpace resources, is a very capable business analyst, developer and software architect.   When Bill has any questions or wants to bounce some ideas of another developer, he’ll contact me to see who’s available, or will email the Visionpace group at large.   

I can hear you ask, if this has been working well for the client for the past two years, why modify the process now?  We’re getting near the end of the story list and both the client and Visionpace want to make the transition smooth for everyone involved.  By establishing a consistent iteration length and forecasting the user stories, we can track the number of points implemented during each iteration and determine the velocity.  With the velocity we can project  when we think we’ll implement all the stories.  In the meantime, we can leverage the protocol that already exists and if a new story is discovered, it can be added to the back log.  This is just an example of how a little change in the development process can bring a controlled wrap up to a project.

The upside to all this is that we can continue to use what works for this environment and project, and introduce enough process to address the changes in the environment without missing a beat.  Hence the thought, “It’s never too late to go more agile.”