Life in an Agile World

Earlier this year, PayCycle transitioned to an agile development process with monthly sprints. There were many motivations for the change, some internally driven and some externally driven. Agile is not a new concept. In fact, it's been around for many years. Since PayCycle is headquartered in Silicon Valley, we have the opportunity to take advantage of innovation and best practices that are happening in our neck of the woods. Agile is just one of those best practices that we're making part of our culture. There are also some tangible business benefits for us. We're able to develop features more iteratively, include key stakeholders in the development process, and incorporate customer feedback throughout the development process.  

We are following a scrum methodology that involves five stages for each sprint team:

• A product planning meeting with the sprint team and key stakeholders.
• A sprint planning meeting with the sprint team
• Daily scrums, which are 15-minute stand-up meetings where team members discuss status, plans, and any blocking issues that need resolution. The scrums have improved collaboration and have allowed teams to focus on the deliverables for that month's sprint.
• A demo meeting where the sprint team shows stakeholders their completed deliverable and gets feedback, which can be incorporated into the next sprint.
• A retrospective meeting where the sprint team discusses key learnings from the sprint so that they can improve the process for the next sprint.

In this new agile world, we start the month with a series of demos from the previous month's sprints and then launch into the planning meetings for the new sprints that are starting this month. We've just recently aligned all of the sprints so that they all start and end at the same time. Right now our biggest challenge is conference room space! We'll see how it's going after another few sprint cycles and make adjustments as needed. Even as we defined our new agile development process, we've been agile about it. We fine-tuned and improved the process with the feedback and lessons we learned along the way.

Throughout the year, I'll blog about our progress. And if you've got thoughts you'd like to share, post a comment or send me an e-mail: vinay@paycycle.com.

Comments

[Tom Kincaid]

Hi Vinay,

Are you following any particular process document in your agile development effort or using particular book?

Tom

[Vinay Pai]

Tom,

I used an agile coach, Connie Weiss, to help define and implement our process. We also used the book "The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility" as a reference with the team.

Background on Connie: http://www.linkedin.com/in/connieweiss
e-mail: connie@dataaspects.com