Hyderabad - Days 3-6 - OMG - XP Can Work!
Well, we have had a very busy 3 days, even by 30-day blitz standards. We have completed a project plan that took us to about 34 days, debated an extra 2 days about design, and through a very messy, socratic process, come to start the build phase as of Friday night, continuing into today (Saturday morning here in India).
While normally Saturday and Sunday work are not part of a 30-day blitz, we are doing the work this weekend, so we can take advantate of the time of our delegation from Ireland and the US. Besides, we have momentum now, and we don't want to lose it.
Some observations (from my project journal):
We are building software. Building. No more design. No more flagellation.
I take that back, we are doing active, “show me” design – the kind that can only take place after you put up a strawman and get a chance to see what you are working on in action. That perspective is from where the real design takes place – as in – seeing what you thought of first, and then making adjustments when you go along. That, my friends, is the essence of agile.
We find ourselves almost (shudder) automatically adopting some XP style practices. We are doing some degree of pair programming, as we subdivide in to groups. Or, sometimes, “trio” programming, depending on the group and the problem being solved at the particular time.
One of the most difficult things, it appears, is getting people that are used to programming from a full spec to embrace the chaos that comes with programming to any level of ambiguity. We here in the states, with the advance of agile techniques, have almost come to accept that ambiguity is part and parcel with the software development process. We gave up the construction project analogy long ago, that you could completely spec out a project and have it build to an exact set of specifications. In other words, we take it for granted that waterfall, in the large (i.e. 6 months of BDUF, followed by 6 months of build) is dead.
Here in India, it seems, there is still a great expectation that you will design the whole darn thing before you build it. However, what has been truly gratifying is watching our teams adopt this stuff – and start to figure it out! It is somewhat of a chaotic mess at times as we bumble down that path of figuring out how to work in a new way, but we all go through that as we adopt agile – especially when we are coming from a regime of non-agile thinking!
Besides, I know damn well that the people of India can think in an agile manner. I have seen them drive here J - probably agile taken to an extreme (insert picture taken from road of cars driving on wrong side of the road in order to increase efficiency of traffic flow).
The jist of this is that we are moving along, guns a blazing. We have ingrained in the team that The Perfect is The Enemy of The Good. We will have plenty of time for perfection later on in the blitz. Right now, we get something up and running - a strawman, so we can have something tangilble to work from in the following days.
Some pictures from the blitz, so far:
Team #1, Workflow
Team #2, Portal
The War Room - aka the PMO