Freelance Mag

The world is changing fast and so is the world of Agile. The Agile I had experienced when I worked as programmer at my last IT firm was more about project management and successful completion of a release through the phases of development and testing to delivery and support. There was a healthy collaboration between team members of a project that worked really well but command chain was still there. Developers and Testers still had to report to their Project Manager (PM). The PMs further reported to their seniors in the firm until the chain ended at VP (Operations). Our client was a company located abroad and the stakeholders communicated through emails and Skype.

Most IT firms where I worked as programmer were IT services industry, there was very little greenfield work and most of the time we had to maintain/fix code written by other engineers who couldn't even be found in some cases!

I worked as a programmer at several IT firms which practiced Agile in some form or other, there used to be stand-ups, scrums, TDD, code reviews and even peer coding but not once did I find anyone have issues with following hierarchy or seniority of order in teams. That's not to say that hierarchies are a pristine thing, they have their share of problems too.