Thursday, October 11, 2007
Agile @ Microsoft
Posted on Thursday, October 11, 2007 8:18:34 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  Comments [0] | 
Categories: Agile

pandp This morning Vish sent me a link to a video of the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team space at Microsoft. I checked it out over lunch, and besides showing off some really sweet developer digs, Peter Provost & Ed Jezieski talk about how the whole Patterns & Practices team uses agile methodologies. They also mention that the Team System Database Professional team is using Scrum to build their project, and that more and more product teams are "dropping by" to see how agile is working for them. Given that this video is over a year old (posted on Oct 5th 2006), it would seem that Agile has been making serious inroads at Microsoft.

Organizations the size of Microsoft have a lot of inertia, and things don't change easily. But if Microsoft can see the value and adapt, what can possibly be holding other groups back? If you are not using Agile - why not?

Getting started is pretty simple - the hardest thing is deciding to start. As for what you need - lots of teams run almost entirely on 3 by 5 index cards, with a little Excel used to make burn-down charts. Of course once you get rolling, using some software to track everything simplifies things (in my opinion), but it's certainly not needed to get started. Once you show the benefit to the organization, I think you'll find that funding for Agile tools is pretty easy to come by.

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