Hiring in an Agile environment

I am currently reading a book call Re-Imagine written by Tom Peters. So far, the book basically talks about how things are changing towards service. Having a great product is just the price for entry and great service is what makes a company successful. He also talks about customer success rather than customer satisfaction. More about this in a later post… after I finish reading…

 

One of the key points he tells is that we have to completely Re-Imagine the way we do things. Re-imagine everything to be successful.

 

In our current agile teams,there are always a bottle neck. Some times it is developers, if the new feature being developed is investigation intensive or it is the testers if the sprint involves a lot of US that are testing intensive.  The agile methodology says that every member should be able to do everything. Sure, people should have expertise in certain areas, but every member should be able to develop as well as test. However, with our current setup, it is very difficult for a tester to learn coding and God alone can help our customers if we trust developers to do testing.

 

Even when we have opening now, we still seem to be hiring according to old department of Dev,QA and Doc. 

Instead, we should re-imagine the hiring process and hire a ‘Agile team member’.  Since it is very difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, this new hiring process will work only for fresh Graduates.

 

Here is what we should do –

• Create a comprehensive aptitude test.
• One round of interview where the existing team members( not manager or lead) will interview the candidates. The team members select the candidates. After all, it is the team which has to finally work with him/her once hired. This interview need not be technical in nature.

Once the candidates are selected, they are given 6 months to prove themselves. Their 6 months would involve doing the following –

• Learning about the product
• Start contributing to the team as a tester at the end of first 3 months.
• At the end of 6 months, they should have finished the following –
  • Create one cool project with the things the candidate has learnt. This project should be designed coded and unit tested by the candidate.Any standard project like “library management” or things like that will be rejected by the mentor immediately.
  • Should be able to contribute to the team as a developer.

At the end of 6 months we have a truly rounded candidate who can do both testing as well as coding. I am not considering technical writing as it is rarely a bottle neck in the team.

Advantages

• True Agile team member. No more QA,DEV,DOC business..
• We might just get a star amongst us. Since the candidate is still a fresher, the ROI for the company will be unmatched.
• We get 6 months to evaluate a candidate.

Disadvantages

• A fresher might have ‘further’ studies in his/her plans and might quit soon.
• Management issues. If the candidate does both QA and DEV who evaluates the person. How will the appraisal process apply? Do we need to Re-imagine the appraisal process?

What do you think? Does your company hire a developer or an agile team member?