By balki | November 17, 2016 | 0 Comment
This post was originally published by me in April 2016, while I worked as an Engineering Manager at New Relic.
When I first joined the .NET Agent engineering team at New Relic last fall, the rock solid team was already doing great work at a good pace. At the same time, though, we knew we needed to speed the delivery of critical functionality for our customers.
Just as important, we needed to make sure our stakeholders (particularly Product Management and Support) were crystal clear about which features were going to be in what release, and when that release would go live. They needed to know what we were working on at any given time so they could better guide us on what to deliver next for our customers.
We were counting on agile development practices to address these issues. But New Relic and the development team were generally resistant to adopting heavy process requirements. Here’s how we made it work.
Our goals were simple:
To accomplish these goals, we structured our lightweight agile process along four key best practices:
1. Continue daily standup meetings (and make sure they don’t go over 10 minutes).
2. Work in two-week sprints: The team had been doing one-week sprints, but that wasn’t long enough to ensure a meaningful release at the end.
3. Ban coding on the last day of the sprint (mostly): On the second Friday of the sprint we start the day with an organized demo for stakeholders, followed by
4. Institute creative elements to increase transparency: