Question

I am working in a dev team where we religiously follow agile.

However, I have not had to change how I work (unit testing etc doesn’t count as I do that anyway). I mean, do I need to change how or how often I communicate? This soft skill side of things with agile is what I am interested in.

Thanks

Answer 1

If your team is utilizing agile well, then you probably should see some changes in how you work. It’s possible that you already developed with a fairly “agile-compatible” mindset, even if your previous work experience was in a more waterfall-style methodology.

Some specific things that I think agile developers ought to be doing (and in a well-run agile team, will naturally find they need to do)

• Focus on incremental, complete changes rather than massive architectures – This is a core tenant of agile from the macro planning side, but it’s also important to practice even for an individual developer. With a 2 or 3 week iteration, you’ll find you simply don’t have the time to spend 1 1/2 weeks developing something, and half a week integrating it all together.
• Check in early, check in often, and check in working code – Don’t do this, and you’ll soon find you’re that guy famous for breaking the build with a day left before the iteration ends.
• Know what’s blocking you, and what is likely to block you in the upcoming week or two, and tell people about it – No one in an agile team likes hearing at the last second that a developer working on a critical piece is held up waiting for something to complete his work.
• Think about the end of an iteration throughout the iteration – Every line of code you write should be done with the consideration of whether this is realistic to complete before the iteration is over.
• Always Be Crunching (hey, I couldn’t have a pithy list of advice without a cute, Glengarry Glen Ross ripped off acronym!) You’ll learn by your second or third iteration that slacking off for a week followed by some all nighters is going to bite you in the ass.

If you’re already following all these – great! They’re certainly general best practices rather than being specific to Agile. I think most developers do have a bad habit or two that this list addresses, though (I know I do on occasion.)