Doing management, again.

Well, after a valiant/vain attempt to avoid getting hauled into it, I'm in the team leadership business again. This time, I'm officially a Scrum Master of one of the 9 or 10 development teams for my current project (number varies with whether you consider one of the teams part of the main project). The result is that I'm about 50% hands on developing still and 50% sitting in on meetings. Fortunately, this project is reasonably disciplined about meetings and we don't run on and on and on and on. This does mean that I'll be in California at least a little while longer. It's not that bad, and there's no hurricanes, but I also haven't sold the house in Florida yet.

The good news is that we're using Scrum instead of a Waterfall methodology. For those of you who are mercifully insulated from software development processes, this basically means that we're working in monthly iterations instead of trying to figure out what ALL of our requirements are, then figure out the system design for the WHOLE system, then coding said WHOLE system, then going to test it and figuring out what we have isn't what we need or some other variation of the death march disaster theme. For a hilarious metaphor for scrum, check out Peter Stevens explanation to his parents. I'd argue that Mr. Stevens is really just describing the Agile ideal of iterative development in general rather than Scrum in particular, but we can be a little loosey goosey on occasion and let it slide just this once ;) .

Anyway, here I am managing people again and this time it's not just contractors. Don't they realize that my roommate is a one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater? It's a good thing there's no purple people on the team. Although if anyone gets out of hand, I suppose I can call up a Witch Doctor to turn them purple!