Hello World

Hi.

I keep saying I need to start blogging. Particularly when I find myself in the middle of Twitter discussions where 140 characters just isn't enough!

So I've finally gotten round to setting up a Blogger account. I figure that's a good start. A blank canvas, if you will.

It's hard to say what will appear here. I can see it being mainly used to host rants, responses to rants, mostly testy related stuff with the occasional nod to good ideas, thoughts, hopes, dreams and suchlike.

Now, about that title: Agile by accident


It's a phrase that I invented (I think it was me anyway) at the last #sheftest meetup. Accidentally. The basic idea being that it's all well and good claiming to do 'best practice' and adhering to standards, but if the best practice that you're using turns out to be the wrong tool for the job then is it really the best practice after all? A lot of the principles of any good methodology just comes down to having some sense and a bit of foresight. If we're doing something that isn't working then we have the strength and humility to tweak it or ditch it completely and try again.

When we decided to officially adopt Agile and Scrum at Technophobia we noticed that we were already doing a lot of their key concepts because they just made sense. We were having daily standups, breaking work into small manageable chunks and constantly badgering our product owner for feedback. We were already being quite Agile without even realising it.

One of our biggest projects has since migrated to our own flavour of Scrumban. Scrum wasn't quite right but Kanban didn't really fit for us either. We've rearranged the scrum board so it's more in line with our task workflows and imposed limits and exit criteria on the columns. It's even better now, but we're constantly tweaking the process when we think we can do something better.