My History

My experience with so-called agile practices started many years ago. Hungry for information and learning, I spent a lot of time reading comp.lang.c++. All of the sudden this new guy (who many know as simply Phlip) appears and starts answering posts with, "oh check out your answer here" and gives a link to Ward's Wiki. So began my introduction to Extreme Programming, and I pushed an early version of CppUnit into my workflow soon thereafter.

From there I took a stab at starting my own game company, during which time one of the other partners stumbled across Scrum and we all agreed to implement it. In many ways, things went spectacularly. Not so spectacular was the fact that money ran out without securing more, and thus it came to a close.

This experience, however, landed me a job at Southern California game developer, where discussion in the interview turned to Agile quickly, and the team appeared really interested to learn more about the whole affair but hadn't done much along those lines to date. This second project ended up bearing significant risk from day one, so I introduced Scrum to help deal with this risk. I also installed a unit testing framework that we could all use as we wished, from my perspective I wanted it mostly to "protect" functionality that I was depending on. Sadly, and despite hitting our agreed-on milestones several months in a row, the studio's primary project was floundering and the financiers really wanted to see more progress. Thus, the second project was shut down, the staff relocated to the primary project, and a Scrum-style system implemented and embraced for the entire team of 70 developers. This studio is now known as somewhat of a poster-child for Agile in games, and I'm glad for having been a part of that.

After that experience, I've been around the block quite a bit. A little Scrum implementation here, a little unit testing there, and some pair programming introductions at this other place. The pair programming was one of the most interesting experiments, because the programmers fought it tooth and nail despite the fact that they ended up getting far more functionality done in any given time period than they had when they were flying solo. At this time, I'm at Yet Another SoCal Developer and basically the guy behind what'll be The New Agile in the company and with any luck, in the industry at-large.