I recently started reading Agile Software Development with Scrum by Schwaber and Beedle. It’s a great introduction to this branch of the Agile movement. It’s easy to read and contains practical advice and straight-forward explainations of the terms and processes involved with Scrum.
Even more satisfying than the read itself was the realisation that I’ve been using a good number of the Scrum techniques in managing projects within my team for the last three years or so. I love the idea of a development team reaching a nirvana-like hyper-productive state though one of the examples of a four-person team at Quattro producing 1000 lines of C++ a week took me aback.
In the middle of last month I moved to a new position at WTSI, Team Leader for the New Sequencing Pipeline development team (currently consisting of me). Since then I’ve been working on what I’ll now call a code sprint and last week I had my first product increment. The product is a smallish system for tracking runs on the new technology sequencing machines but is around 10,000 lines of Perl (excluding templates, CSS & tests) built on a light MVC framework I produced in the same time. A one man-team producing 3,333 loc in a week seems ultra-productive and I can’t believe it’s *purely* down to the fact that Perl is easier to write than C++.
Anyway, I’m on a C++ course all next week, so I’ll soon be able to tell. Shame it’s not about Rails instead ;)