Karolis Valiulis

I studied in the last course of Software Engineering in my Bachelor, when I had a lecture about Agile. We touched basic concepts of Agile, analysed differences between Agile and Waterfall. But it was difficult to feel the real benefit of it as having no real working experience. I wrote my final thesis at university about “Using Agile in virtual teams”. But that was from theoretical point of you. So, I was eager to try Agile in a real development!

I started my IT career as a developer in a small IT company, having a few developers. I had a task to build a small Python App. I was working alone on that project. It had some advantages as I didn‘t need to wait for others’ deliveries and was the king of myself. But… Still No Agile!

The other project I was creating with my colleague. A team was consisted of two developers. Can we use Agile? We took some practises of it, but still not real Agile. The third project was better for that. We had a team of three developers and started to build an application from scratch. I took a Team Leader/Scrum Master role and we started to use Scrum. Sure, it was an adaption of Scrum, as we didn’t have a real Product Owner; I had other responsibilities in a company in a larger than project scale and so on. But it was good, although I thought I need more Agile and it isn’t the real one I dreamt about.

Two years ago I got an offer to join a big enterprise organization. They were in a way of big changes around development processes and turned in a more Agile way. I thought it would be a great ability to put my hands on that. I started as a Scrum Master/developer. One of the first challenges was distributed teams. Firstly, we have time zone differences. It isn’t a very big deal, as the difference is just one hour, but it still adds some complexity to the process. Secondly, team members had different experiences around Agile. Some of them were used to work in a waterfall for ages. It took some time for switching in a different way of working; using tools (like Jira) properly; understand the advantages of Agile. Last but not least, Product Owner had different roles in the organization and was lacking of time for paying attention to the project. We needed to fill Product Backlog by ourselves and suggest tasks to the next Sprint Backlog.

Two years passed and unfortunately we still have some of the issues listed above. But I see the progress and believe we are in a good way. The lesson I learned is that we need to start using Agile by using Agile. Generally speaking it fits for all changes in the organization. Don’t expect them to happen immediately. Split them to the really small ones and start implementing step by step. Don’t expect to change everything at once. Agile is not just a methodology, it is a mind-set!