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Introducing XP to a large organisation
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Challenge
A large organisation was considering alternative approaches to software development. Oakleigh gave a presentation based on a recently completed project utilising agile principles. As a result, we were invited to run one of the organisation's new projects using agile principles - a method of working completely new to the organisation's software team.
Solution
Oakleigh Consulting provided a project manager who was experienced in agile methods and three developers/architects to work with the 10-strong project team in a mentoring and coaching capacity as well as fulfilling development roles.
In delivering the project, Oakleigh concentrated on introducing a number of agile principles to the development team, namely:
- Pair programming - Oakleigh developers initially paired off with the internal developers as a means of training those not familiar with agile practices and starting to impact the existing culture of the project team. After a few iterations as everyone became more comfortable with the concepts, the pairings were less mandated.
- Iterations - Rather than the previous experience of big bang delivery the project was organised into a number of iterations, with each iteration delivering a set of stories.
- Stories - At the beginning of each iteration the business selected the stories that they perceived were important for the next phase of delivery. As the developers worked on the stories, the effort required to deliver the story was recorded to enable future estimating of stories to be more accurate.
- Test driven delivery - Deployment of code without the associated tests was one of the more significant changes in the working practices of the project team but one that proved to be useful.
- Daily builds - At the end of the day only completed and tested code was committed to the code repository and a run of all tests was undertaken to ensure their had been no code introduced which broke the complete package.
Outcome
The successful delivery of the solution proved to senior management that the use of agile processes had been a large improvement on the processes they normally employed. The wholesale adoption of the agile approach across their entire development capacity was felt to be too much work to undertake in one go, and so Oakleigh helped them select key processes that proven most beneficial in the project for early adoption, with a plan to adopt further agile processes as time progressed.
If you have any questions about the subjects covered in this white paper or you would like to find out more about how Oakleigh Consulting could help your organisation, please contact us on 0161 835 4100 or email us.
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