Trying Trello

The new hotness in software development is “agile“. At my prior day job, it was waterfall. Sure they tried to adopt agile processes, but it really wasn’t going to happen. Due to the nature of the products and process, it just can’t be agile, tho they could try to adopt a few things and make some improvements. But at my new day job? Agile can make a LOT of sense. Take home: you can’t impart the process merely because it’s the new hotness or you think if you just adopt X process it’ll solve problems. Like any problem to be solved, you have to understand your problem fully and then apply the right tools to solve it, and that includes what processes you use.

However, it’s tough getting folks on board, so I’ve desire to try to sneak in agile stuff as we can. It’s nothing more than a commentary on human condition — we tend to resist change. If all this change is dropped on folks all at once, we’ll balk. I would too. Massive sudden change, especially when you’ve still got daily chaos and stress to manage, well… the change will be rejected. But if we can make little changes here, little changes there, over time we get there.

One thing I can tell is we all need a way to see the whole picture. We’ve got so many things going on at once, and it changes on a daily and sometimes sub-daily basis. I find myself often making lists and (re)telling my todo lists to my teammates merely to help ensure 1. I know what I’m doing and am on track, 2. that we’re all on the same page. By sharing with them I hope that if there’s a mismatch, they’ll speak up and correct. I’d rather be perceived as over-communicating than under-communicating.

But all this talk doesn’t solve the problem for everyone. The dev team is one thing, testing another, production another, sales another, marketing another… there’s so many things. Sure, we could use our issue tracking system, and there’s a lot of sense in that approach. But the issue tracker doesn’t work as well for non-dev folk PLUS it’s harder to get a 1000′ view. Yes, pictures/diagrams can make a big difference.

One thing from the agile/scrum world is having the daily stand-up meetings at “the wall”. Let’s set aside the meeting for now (again, baby steps), and just focus on the wall. I’ve suggested the wall, because I think that would be useful. Pick a wall in the office, divide it up in whatever way makes sense for us, then start populating it with sticky notes to represent all the tasks to be done. I think that’ll be useful at keeping a somewhat permanent record of the state of things (unlike a whiteboard, which will be erased eventually). Plus it allows anyone to just look at the wall at any time of the day to see where things are. CEO wants to know what’s up with Customer X? Just look at the wall. Did we ship Product Y yet? Just look at the wall.

Alas, one shortcoming is 1. we don’t have a lot of free wall space left in the office, 2. the wall is restricted to the physical. I’ve been searching for a digital wall solution and haven’t found much that thrills me. Something that we could access from any computer via a web browser (or even a platform-based app), and it would look good. But then we could also access from iOS or Android devices. In the office. Out of the office. At 3 AM, during office hours. From my desk, in a meeting on the shared screen. Whatever. Something with power to do what we need, but flexibility to work for anyone, not just the geeks.

So… I recently read this article from Joel Spolsky about “Software Inventory”. While I read it, it sounded like it was talking directly to me and our situation. I went looking at their solution:

Trello

I’ve only just started to play with it, but it seems like it could be the answer to my problems. I could see using this in my personal life, for Hsoi Enterprises, and for the day job stuff. Even if the rest of the office doesn’t buy into it, it could be useful for my own management of my tasks and issues to deal with. Being able to SEE everything instead of sorting through a bunch of text notes and to-do lists is sometimes much more useful, even if it ends up being redundant and a little more maintenance to keep 2 data stores in sync.

It’s still preliminary, but it’s promising.