Recently, I’ve been asked several times: “Mirka, are you still in bart?” I am, ? And I plan to be.
I’ve been working at bart for a long time. It’s even a two-digit number if we want to talk about exact years. And just like any long-term relationship, mine with bart has gone through different stages: enthusiasm, motivation, joy and, let’s not lie to each other, sometimes even stress or nerves.
It won’t work in a classic way
The IT sector is a highly competitive and turbulent market. There are many opportunities around us and we all have some internal motivation and reasons to stay in a job or change it. For me, it’s essential to have a work environment that isn’t based on constant control or KPI measuring, but has confidence in people. At the same time, I need to identify with the values of the company. And I also want to be part of a company that wants to move forward not only through numbers in the form of profit, but also through internal processes, improvements.
I remember how a few years ago we were dealing with projects through classic development. But as we grew, with each new client, we had to reschedule things, and often the tasks were just pushed in front of us. I also remember the frustration that grew in me when priorities changed frequently. And I also remember the day we agreed that this isn’t the way, and we need to look at things in an agile way.
A new agile world
Yes, I know, the word agile is a term that jumps at us everywhere, even out of the fridge. Everyone uses it, but not everyone knows what it means. For me, to be agile means to be proactive in different and often changing situations, welcoming change and not moaning about it. We are innovative, flexible or creative. And when we don’t just pretend to be agile, but really think like that, we win.
There are a number of agile frameworks that we could choose from, and after several consultations with experts, we opted for SCRUM and KANBAN. Since then, the world in bart has changed.
I won’t say that everything was pink and beautiful and that there was a perfect peace that continues to this day. We even had to say goodbye to some people who were used to traditional development and didn’t want to accept agility. But we gradually changed the way we worked on individual projects, guided and educated people and our customers, and in the end it all fit together.
SCRUM sensibly
SCRUM uses an empirical approach. This means that in development, we try to work with a system based on facts, experience and verification. The aim is to learn and improve past mistakes. That’s what we are constantly trying to do, because we have always made mistakes and we will keep making them. It’s a framework and it doesn’t have exactly defined procedures. The best advice I received during one of the training sessions was that when we can’t make a decision, we should use common sense. ? Scrum gives each team member space to express their opinion and gives them the opportunity to improve things. And that’s the beauty of it.
The change to agile development in our company took place in 2016, we went through a lot of courses and many projects passed through my hands since then. I still believe that there’s a lot I can learn about agile development and moreover, I couldn’t sleep for thinking whether what we do, we really do as best as we can. So after six years of talking about SCRUM, I decided that it was time to check, test and certify my knowledge. So this blog article is written by a certified Scrum master ?
The certification exam itself was very interesting – it got really sweaty here and there ? 80 questions in English, which we had to answer in 60 minutes. But it wasn’t only about theory, questions were largely formed by practical examples. And so, during the certification, I also got answers as to whether things were moving in the right direction in bart. ?
I am proud of bart.sk and the journey we went through together. I would therefore like to share it with you further in a few articles about agile development – from a customer’s point of view as well as from a developer’s point of view. In the nearest future, we’ll do a brief introduction to SCRUM and we’ll be tidying up a room. ?
