Maarten Dekker

Maarten Dekker Originally, I am an electrical engineer, but switched to software development in 2000. Starting in a waterfall environment that was making a transit to RUP, I quickly found out it is nearly impossible to cover everything you are going to stumble over during a project. In 2003, the company I was working for started to introduce some facets of working agile, introducing a daily stand ups. We quickly found out that it doesn't solve anything if the requirements are all written out, and the writers are not available. Since that was the only change this company was prepared to make, I accepted a job in 2006, working in a SAAS environment, that updated their application every 2 weeks. Not a strict agile environment, since we didn't approach projects in an agile way, all requirements should have been met before something was released. (which led to some things never released, and some things not meeting the expectations) I started working in a 100% agile environment at my current job. We had to start working on a complete new application, and choose to adopt scrum as the method to come to what the users really want. I must say that since then, everything has fallen into place for me. The first year, I acted as team member, while also having the role of solution architect. We worked in a distributed team, situated in the UK and the Netherlands, but having tools like Skype for scrums, and getting together for sprint meetings, this is not a problem at all. Deadlines for the MVPs were made with ease, making the less agile teams in our company look bad :) Especially since we could assume the application was going to be received positive by our customers, because pilot customers were constantly involved. In 2016, I adopted the scrum master role for our team. During the same year, we expanded the number of people working on the product by introducing a second team in Hyderabad in India. Currently, I am the scrum master for both teams. Getting together with the team in Hyderabad for sprint meetings is something we cannot do, but we have something we cannot do, but we constantly discuss things over skype. Interaction between the two teams is also great, which is necessary, since we both work on the same project, owned by one application owner.