My IBMi team doesn't really follow a development model. Each dev has their own unofficial set of apps and practices.
My favorite idea from Agile is incremental releases, something I've been doing since before hearing about Agile. I have seen strong resistance to incremental releases from Windows devs and management. Our Windows team is dead-set on epic releases. I've also had managers get very irate when I do incremental releases. They're adamant for all-or-nothing.
-----Original Message-----
From: Dan [mailto:dan27649@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2018 9:53 PM
To: RPG400-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx; Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Agile coming to our shop (supposedly)
(Cross-posted to RPG & Midrange lists)
So, our newish manager threw out this bone at a recent team standup. I have no experience with Agile, although early in my tenure at a large insurance company, our iSeries folks worked in the same office as the web dev team, which was described to be full-on Agile. They were also known as the Agile team, so there's that.
I remember reading this thread 5 years ago:
https://archive.midrange.com/rpg400-l/201310/msg00393.html
Never gave it much more thought, since it has never come up in that time.
I'm not sure where the impetus for trying to "implement" Agile is coming from. This company has always treated IT as a liability. The tenured i developers here feel that they are set up to fail, with new overhead responsibilities but with the same tight deadlines to get projects completed. Any new "philosophy" like Agile will be met with Superman-strength resistance. I laughed when I read about "paired development", cuz heads would explode if that were ever tried here. The tenured devs and the new contractors they just recently brought on are absolute old-school, monolithic developers, for whom 2000+ lines of mainline code are standard fare. Service programs are avoided like the plague. I developed a service program last year with functions that could be used in almost every day development, but I am the only one who uses them.
I am curious if there are any old-school iSeries shops with "heels dug in"
devs who have attempted to "implement" any part of the Agile philosophy, and how that went.
- Dan
midrange.com
