Oleksandr Plutalov

Alexander Plutalov. By the moment of certification i already had about 4 years of experience in professional IT and all these years i've been working as a manager: started from technical lead in a team of 3 persons, then occupied position of project manager and finally got position of ScrumMaster in a team of 9 persons. Despite of the fact i wasn't working as developer i have a solid technical background - i've been working as freelancer for several years before joined one of ukrainian companies.

Since the company i joined had no development life cycle at all i immediatelly started implementing RUP since it was the only SDLC i was familiar with at that time. But really soon i figured our that this process doesn't work for me, for my customer and for the company i work for. Set of problems is classic: too many changes on-the-fly, customer doesn't know what he wants etc. So, i decided to implement some of Extreme Programming principles in the team. That way we implemented iterative development, unit tests, continuous integration, working in pairs. And after that everything finally started working!

At new position we had to choose SDLC that will suit all the team's and customer's needs and i decided to use SCRUM. It took some time in order to start performing: together with the team we had to find right tools, develop process and rules, get used to the new process etc. For the year passed the team released 4 products into production and from my point of view this is the key indicator of success.