(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
