My Agile Journey: Part 1
My formal introduction to agile software development, specifically Scrum, came when the very small, privately held, niche company was purchased by a subsidiary of a large international conglomerate. I was working as a full stack developer: MS SQL, ASP.NET Web Forms, SOAP Web Services, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XSLT, etc. The code base was over a decade old and had been cobbled together quickly and somewhat carelessly by the long gone founders. Older technologies such as ASP.NET 2.0 and ActiveX really needed to be replaced. The opportunity came with the sale of our company. The new parent organization said they wanted us to use Scrum and that they would train us. The onsite training was scheduled without regard for their Operations team's schedule which resulted in many issues. We did not have a Product Owner or Scrum Master, so a new to the company (and industry) Development Manager became the Scrum Master and a tenured Development Manager became the Product Owner; neither