Archive for August, 2008
As with all things, an introduction.
Starting a new journal or blog is always difficult for me. Given such a vastly blank sheet of (virtual) paper to work with, the prospect of filling it all intimidates me greatly. Fortunately, this blog is a bit more focused than some of the others I’ve endeavored upon in the past, so I hope that it will make writing that much easier.
As you can probably tell from the title of the blog, my name is Heather McLean. I’ve worked in IT for over ten years now, growing from a humble web designer into a software architect over that time span. Most of that time was spent in the typical waterfall shops (or in some cases, just plain chaos). It wasn’t until March of this year, when I started at a company called ThinkCash, that I got my first taste of agile.
I had heard of agile in the past, of things like Scrum and Extreme Programming. But most places tend to treat such things as a passing fad. We have processes in place that have worked for decades, so why should we change now? Even I admit to being skeptical in the beginning… agile is just too weird to be effective, or so I thought.
After my first couple of sprints, I was pleasantly surprised. The team was self-managing and working together in harmony on several different tasks, producing results on a periodic basis to the product owner. It was an amazing experience. There were some spectacular successes, but of course also some incredible failures. The company just started using Scrum at the beginning of the year, and so there were a lot of hurdles to overcome. Every iteration is a learning experience for everyone in the company.
Within a short time, I’ve found that I am one of the few, loud voices in the company championing Scrum. Having been wholly converted, I stand behind agile principles and try my best to impart the teachings to anyone who will listen. I’m currently also transitioning into a role that will empower me with the ability to focus a good deal of my time on training in general for our already spectacular development staff.
And thus we come to the reason why this blog is here… to chronicle the journeys of a blossoming agile advocate. I plan on finally attending a Scrum certification course next month, and I hope that is the first of many steps. My ultimate goal is to become a Certified Scrum Trainer so that I might spread the gospel of agile product development.