Q4 - What has been your least satisfying Agile experience?
My last full-time software development job before I wrote the first book was underwhelming. I had a couple of great co-workers, but our development process was... ambitious and underwhelming at the same time. We used a mixture of Scrum and XP where we dutifully broke up all of our work into stories and engineering tasks, estimated the necessary work, let our tests drive our design and refactoring, and did pretty well at all of the development practices. (I wish we'd paired more, but....)
The problem was that it was a very small consulting shop with lots of different small customers to satisfy, so we'd work on multiple projects every week. We did have a single grand project to work on, but only when we had had enough billable work for the month for us to spend time on a new product. Mostly we lacked a grand cohesive vision for our work, at least one that could predict what we should work on at a high-level on a weekly basis.
It wasn't an unpleasant experience -- I do remember favorably the experience of customizing a F/OSS point of sale system to the point where our largest customer could use it successfully in a month's time -- but it was unsatisfying because we had to spend so much time just staying in business that we didn't have as many opportunities to succeed at our business. Despite that, our software quality improved dramatically and we were able to meet the needs of our customers much better, thanks in part to much better development practices.
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