Trying to be Agile

When I first started doing agile, I applied the Scrum approach pretty faithfully. I’d capture my user stories, get my product owner to prioritize them, and get the first iteration planned. On small, straight-forward projects, this was all that was needed.

 

As I got into bigger, more complex projects, things didn’t always go so smoothly. I can remember one particular project, when we were in iteration 5 and realized that our focus on just user stories brought about a gap with the technical aspects of the project. Having a simple design and refactoring wasn’t enough. We needed to do a bit more design up front.

 

That’s where Disciplined Agile Deliver (DAD) comes in. DAD is a hybrid of techniques such as Scrum and Extreme Programming, as well as techniques such as Agile Modeling.

 

One of the roles in DAD is the Architect Owner. This is the person that owns the architectural decisions and priorities.

 

So what I’m doing now on projects with more technical complexity is bringing in an architect at the beginning, so as the user stories are being captured, someone is also looking at the project from a technical perspective and coming up with a high-level design of things like integrations with other systems, database requirements, and ensuring the architecture aligns with the organizations architecture standards. This helps reduce the risk, which is always a good thing.