programmer/analyst at XO Telecommuncations
Plano, TX 75074
United States
www.xo.com
January 2004-Present

I am a senior programmer/analyst on an internal commission system. For the last eight years we have used a 4-5 week development cycle and deployed to production after each cycle. We followed an unformalized iterative development process from 2004 to August 2010. During this time we evolved via convergent evolution many processes and artifacts identified in Scrum. In August 2010, we officially adopted Scrum as our process and begin to understand our artifacts in new ways. Specifically, the formal adoption of Scrum helped us in the following ways: 1. the Agile Manifesto allowed us to clearly articulate and provide support for our desires to operate in certain manners. 2. The tasks of the product owner let us know that we are justified in requiring the attention of our customer. 3. The daily Scrum meetings did help to keep communication open and provided an openning to each day that allowed us to effortlessly visualize progress or lack there of. 4. The switch to face-to-face communication rather than email or IM, greatly helped team members to understand each other. We also applied it to groups outside of our group and found that much more is done when you pay folks a visit than when you volley email messages. 5. We found that our team was quite tightly organized around vision/purpose of the commission system before Scrum. But, Scrum stipulated procedures that compelled us to inspect and adapt our state of mind, and this made the fulfillment of the visions much easier.

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