Apr
4
Enpower the developer
Tagged as TomTom, Software development
In the software development world there is one word which cannot be overlooked, especially in the past few years. The word is “agile”. Aiming to make the software development effective by freeing the spirit and fueling the talents and motvations of software developers, agile methods offer an alternative to the “tyranny of the waterfall” or the “illusion of command and controll” of the software development managers. Being a software team leader and developer myself, I’ve been for some time looking for the tools to fight the inherently unpredictible and unknowable factors in the software development. I’ve been looking until I learned the “a-word” a year ago and started trying it out soon after.
This week, I was lucky to be able to attend the Scrum sessions by Jeff Sutherland, agile systems architect and one of the co-creators of the Scrum software development processes. Jeff, currently travelling the globe with the Scrum Certification World Tour, proved to be a skilled expert and a charismatic speaker. There is no point to enumerate here what everything we’ve learned during the sessions - there are numerous books and papers out there. For me personally, two things were important to learn:
(1) The success of using Scrum by a development team highly depends on whether the business (the product owners) understand how team works and why the team works the way it does. If the agile way of making software was introduced bottom-up, go ahead and talk to the business, educate them, argument, involve them! (2) A great deal of the agile methods is about people and about transparency. Enpower the people, forget about being directive, become the facilitator. Do not assign tasks, make the team to be hungry for them.
Jeff had demonstrated that it might take as little as just a single Scrum Master to spark the rebuilding of whole organization to work in an effective, agile way. I wonder how successful can we be in such transformation of development processes at TomTom where I work, I look forward to the challenge.
At the end of the Scrum sessions we learned one more important thing: the Scrum Master secret handshake. Now I can no doubt recognize the great Scrum Masters around. To learn what the secret handshake is, you’ve got to attend some of Jeff’s sessions - I highly recommend!
Yeah, sounds very interesting. While I am far from a Scrum expert, I believe it is a viable option nowadays. I’ll be attending the same training you did in June, so hopefully afterwards I can join your ranks and help make the Desktop & Services department a professional group of the finest software champions this side of the Mississippi.
Thanks for stopping by Kiffin, I have no doubts that you will bring lots of quality and great spirit to the D&S. Enjoy the training!