lather, rinse, repeat

last friday, i went to agile day twin cities and it was just what i needed. after a 13 year stay at my last job, i changed employers, recently. i came to the new job to help bring order to a development organization that was struggling with quality issues and degrading customer satisfaction. it's a great challenge, but i came from a much larger company and was part of a long, slow evolutionary path to agility. i'd gotten used to having people around who "just got it." now, i have people who are willing to let me try things, but there are too many near term fires to be fought to concentrate on future infrastructure.

since getting the job, i've experienced a number of up and down days. the days running up to agile day were some real down ones, and i was feeling quite isolated. i have some customer issues on my desk that are keeping me from implementing the infrastructure we need to get this shop running smoothly.

anyway, agile day was kicked off by a video address by ward cunningham download it here. in it, he makes some great suggestions that have already affected what i'm doing and how i feel about heading to the office.

• programmers are at their best when the help others succeed
• put the top list of things out there for the team to accomplish, together
• work from the known to the unknown
• when you have a good idea, you have to put it into code or else you're wasting the good idea

this last one hit me pretty hard. i had some catchup work to do over the weekend. as i sat there trying to iterate on a problem with some spaghetti code that can't be tested in isolation, i finally threw my hands up and said, "i'm not typing another 20 steps worth of data into this browser just so i can iterate!" the agile day experience had sunk in and, so i spent a little while researching web testing tools. i settled on watir and was driving tests within an hour. this enabled me to iterate much more quickly. i'm way more productive.

ok, back to ADTC, after ward's video, i attended sessions on building teams, continuous delivery, and agile engineering practices. then, during the openspace, i took part in a new-to-agile support group session called "from cowboy to agile." it was good to hear that other people are trying to grow into their agileness. 

cool stuff. 

so, building on ward's thoughts about programmers helping each other and working from the known to the unknown, i decided to introduce watir to our team. everyone smiled as i talked about it. that made me smile. really! nobody even flinched at the "opportunity" to learn ruby. cool. i do think we have the right team in place in this new shop, we just need to create enough space for us to breathe and develop software as a team.

anyway, our watir experience isn't going to be a big bang implementation. we're not going to try to write a massive, durable test suite for our entire product set, in the near term. we're all going to use it to solve our own testing needs for a while and we'll reconvene in a couple of months and see what the team has learned from using it. 

so, we're going to start with the known and work toward the unknown. once we know that, we'll circle back, so lather, rinse, repeat and we'll work our way to operating as a high-functioning team. together.