Day 12 – Freedom through trust

A day of collaboration. As we come to the release, proud of what we have achieved, the atmosphere in the office is bubbling with enthusiasm. We have a sense of freedom that comes from a real trust between development and management. Feeling freedom in the workplace is a rare thing. I’m probably going overboard we still have someone telling us what to do we just decide how to do it and even how much we do and how long we spend on process improvement.

Before Scrum I was told the best way to develop was to assign features to single developers and let them get on with it. How could anything be more efficient?! Time and time it failed, projects overrun and software became bloated. It took some convincing that there was an alternative. I negotiated short sprints as proof of concept and with each sprint confidence and trust grew.

Giving the developers full control allows us to get on with doing what we love. Writing code? No. All we want to do is become better developers. (Why else would we spend all our spare time reading books and blogs?)  Luckily for the business we measure how good we are by the quality of the software we produce.