Reality is not agile. Part 2: full blown corporates
Developing software in a start up environment is challenging. But developing software for a company or institute that exists for decades or even longer, is even a bigger task. Most of the time there is agreement on where we all want to be in a few years. And money? Most of the time, not an issue. But then there is the true challenge: people.
Different people means different opinions about tactics. Some of them take the opportunity to move up in the organization, some of them have a history together (for better or for worse) and there is a lot of knowledge and processes not formalized.
We are now in a project that was extremely well thought out. We were lucky enough to work with their best people and they were very eager to succeed.
After 6 sprints, we discovered that we needed that the documentation of another application that we would integrate, was not maintained.
The guy who built the software originally left the company a year ago and so did the knowledge that we needed.
After a few weeks it became clear that we were not able to get the documentation we actually wanted. The upside: the reason the application did not get a lot of TLC, is because it was quite small and basically end of life. We decided to split the project in two:
- Finish the current project as a minimal viable product
- Recreate the other application
This is where low code shines. Because of the speed of development, there is always the option to create a quick proof of concept.