Staffing Issues

Two staffing adjustments have occurred: our best developer (other than myself) has moved on to join the Empire, and our ineffectual test resource has been pushed out. Best wishes to the former, good riddance to the later.

Now how has agility helped helped us cope with these changes? First our dev guy. Since we are using an iterative approach, the bulk of his previous tasks/responsibilites are in a state of completion and required little hand-off. Additionally, the iterative approach didn't have him pre-committed to longer term projects and goals, leaving little to hand off. The only knowledge transfer was for current-cycle work and what little historical information might be gleaned. Since we're practising continuous integration, there is no fear that code he was working on would be lost - it's already integrated in the product, source control and build automation scripts.

On the test guy, we're actually better off. Not that he was a bad guy, just unable to function in a "pull" environment. By that I mean he required someone to tell him what to do at every stage (push tasks down). Agility is a pull environment requiring all parties to understand what needs to be done at a high level and take appropriate steps to insure they are able to complete the tasks they committed to. Not very friendly to junior people, which is where pairing comes in. He was not junior, tho, so that is no excuse. At the end of the day it is now clear that we have no test resource currently - and visibility is always good.