Hey welcome on my blog! It is just starting its life. It’s young, has a basic design… well, It’s the beginning. Let me tell you about the motivation behind it.

My name is Stéphane. I am from Strasbourg in France. I’m 22 years old  and about to finish a Master of Information System at the school of Supinfo Strasbourg. During those years of studies, I have been mostly becoming a developer on the .NET platform. I am now working in a news monitoring company in Oslo.

I am passionate about .net technologies, but lately, the art of agile and its engineering practices became a second passion. I was last summer working in never.no as a trainee on a very interesting project Frikanalen (careful, it means free channels, not freak an…). On this project I was introduced to Agile with SCRUM and XP. It was a great experience, and I became very interested and enthusiastic about it, read a lot of articles, books, and watched many podcasts. Unfortunately the adventure was shortened by my studies starting again in november.

6 months ago, I started in a totally new environment here in Oslo again. Unfortunately, nobody had introduced Agile here before, and I then really felt the difference. Missing the burn-chart telling me how we’ve been doing the last days, missing the sprint backlog showing me the pile of tasks decreasing, and feeling like “trashing”, jumping from one project to another. Fortunately, mid-June was the conference NDC2009. Amazing gathering of talented speakers, so good at transmitting their knowledge and  enthusiasm! Uncle Bob Martin, Scott Hanselman, Michael Feathers, Mike Cohn, Roy Osherove, and more… The flow of agile was really motivating, and it confirmed to my colleagues the goodness I was telling them about those methods.

Enough complains, It was time to make it happen. Little by little the idea spread among the dozen of employees, managers included. Let the holidays pass and I was ready for the next move step. I held a presentation about scrum, following more or less the great the one of Mike Cohn (you can download all his powerpoint presentation here, I will make my version disponible soon here :) ). People were enthusiast, asked questions, that raised a discussion, and the decision was taken. We give it a try! We operate in 2 weeks long sprints, have a daily scrum meeting, create a backlog and try to continuously improve the process over time. I know that this alone is far from what we could call “Agile”, but we can hardly turn the whole world of everybody upside down so suddenly. It takes time, especially on the side of people habits, and for the engineering practices, but we are moving in the right direction. And I will not give up on this!

As a final word, why trying to find the perfect workplace and a team that would be already agile, with above 90 % code coverage on all its projects, and so on? I decided instead to take the leap of making it happen at my current workplace. It might not be perfect right away, it might be hard, it will be. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that the personal experience I will get from this ambition is worth more than any other. I will keep track of the progress on this blog, and hope to get some feedback of other scrum masters out there to help me achieve this hard transition.