Last year I took a contract at a large organisation on condition that I could introduce Agile (whatever that is) techniques to my team. I finished the other week to take some family time in preparation for our new baby (due any day now).

It’s been an interesting year – intensely frustrating at times; at other times remarkably easy. On occasion I’ve prepared myself for a big effort on some issue such as frequent and regular releases, just to find that I was pushing on an open door. I’ll try and write more about the experience later – obviously I made many of mistakes and learnt a lot.

In the meantime here are some of my favourite moments.

In iteration planning meeting

program manager: Ah this item is very important because of (perceived risk…). We should add it to the sprint.

developer: Yes of course we can….. Now that’s a 2 day estimate. Which item(s) do you want to drop?

program manager: Well, we need that .. and that … and well.. Put it at the top of the next sprint.

Pairing – writing FIT tests for feed mappings

me: Ok, so this rule about the currencies and the commodity name is quite complicated – we should add another table expressing only that rule in this test.

pair: God, I see. This isn’t just a test – it documents the mapping.

The curious thing is that I’d been saying almost that exact thing repeatedly for weeks, if not months. I suppose you just have to see things for yourself.

BA spots mistake in my FIT test.

Near the end of the contract, I finally managed to get a Business Analyst interested in the potential of our acceptance tests. I was particularly pleased when he spotted my misunderstanding of a requirement by looking at the test, a week before he could have got at the code.

Miscellaneous

Team lead: I’ve never felt so closely tracked on a project before.

Big cheese: I am particularly pleased with the progress and visibility of this team.

Various at different times: I ran the tests and this other seemingly unrelated thing broke. I’d have never spotted that. (ok maybe not always those exact words….)