We're no strangers to an Agile process at Dynamo. It's been a part of our development workflow, in one form or another, for 2+ years. We've made a few attempts to incorporate our agile learnings upstream, to the design and strategy portions of a project, with mixed results. What we've learned along the way is that applying agile principles, studio-wide, in a design-centric company that works on multiple, concurrent projects is true challenge. While agile works great for technical aspects of our studio (it was derived from the software industry, after all), we're working hard to make it work for the entire studio by creating our own concept driven agile process.
This past weekend's work retreat was a key first step for us in answering the following question, how can we take everything we love about agile and incorporate those practices studio wide. Our resident agile expert extraordinaire, Nicholas Henry, presented the team with a great proposed solution. We'll be putting that proposal into practice in the coming weeks, refining and adjusting as we go. We're going to document our entire journey, sharing our findings on our blog.
In the spirt of sharing, here's one of the key pieces we took away from this weekend - we call them our Seven "Golden" Agile Practices (please insert your own air quotes when reading the word golden aloud, that makes Nicholas happy). Here they are:
- Start with a project inception
- Scope with feature cards (aka user stories)
- Plan in iterations
- Conduct daily stand-ups
- Demo at the end of every iteration
- Perform mini-retrospectives
- Maintain a visual workspace
We'll apply these practices to each new project that kicks off at Dynamo. We're confident that this revised processed, applied studio-wide and at the outset of the project, we'll help us deliver even higher quality work in a more rewarding and natural way.
Bryan Mahoney
- Bryan is Dynamo's Director of Technology, continually breaking new ground evaluating, developing and guiding our sites and webapps, & a pillar in Dynamo's client service front. Co-author of 2 early books on the integration of ColdFusion and Flash, he is an expert in database driven content management and design. Bryan now principally rides Ruby on Rails.
