Does dev methodology matter? w/ Chris Downard of GigSmart

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
Hey, everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm Dan Lines, and today's topic is Does Dev Methodology Matter? Joining me today is Chris Downard, VP of Engineering at GigSmart.
How's it going, man?

**Chris Downard** (0:15)
I'm doing pretty well. How are you today, Dan?

**Dan Lines** (0:17)
I am doing awesome. It's Friday, feeling good, getting towards the end of the week. So yeah, all good on my side.
And I know you have a ton of stuff that you want to say around process and people and culture and how software development is maybe changing the world in our new reality.
But we have a tradition on the Dev Interrupted Podcast. And Dev Interrupted can mean a bunch of different things. It could mean, hey, I'm getting interrupted by prod bugs or my family, or for me, I've moved over the sales. So sales isn't interrupting me. But I have to ask you this question. What's been interrupting you this week?

**Chris Downard** (1:05)
That's a good one.
Well, last week, my kid's school had a COVID case. So they have switched to remote school this week and next week before they can return. So I've had them at home, we'll call it working with me.

**Dan Lines** (1:21)
So they were at school and then they had one case and now everybody-

**Chris Downard** (1:28)
Yeah. They go to a really small school. There's like 50 kids. And so one case is pretty easy to have that go everywhere.
Yeah, so they're at home, but they're making the best of it. They're on Zoom all day too, just like me. So they're a little remote meeting experts.

**Dan Lines** (1:46)
And do you have your own room or do they, are they-

**Chris Downard** (1:51)
They do through the school. Yeah, Zoom did some program with schools where they made some stuff available. And so tons of schools have switched to Zoom. It's great.

**Dan Lines** (1:59)
Yeah, yeah. I think in 2020, everyone is getting a little bit interrupted by family-related stuff. Families are always awesome. But if you have kids in school, that stuff happens totally normal, I guess now. So we're gonna be talking about does Dev methodology matter?
But let me ask you this, Chris. What Dev methodology is your team following today?

**Chris Downard** (2:30)
So, yeah, so we're using Agile, but we're using a really quirky form of it. I had a boss a long time ago that said, anyone that you ask whether or not they're using Agile, it's always yes, but.

**Dan Lines** (2:42)
It's like, yeah, I'm Agile, but I'm a mix of Scrum and Commbone.

**Chris Downard** (2:51)
Yeah, and you know, we're that amalgamation too, because we don't follow sprinting exclusively, but we use it for our look back. So we generate what we refer to as sprint reports.
But in our daily lives, we're not really talking about the sprints. We're not talking about churn coming in and out of the sprints, because we kind of follow more of a Commbone orientation. And recently we eliminated the idea of teams.

**Dan Lines** (3:16)
So- Oh, really?

**Chris Downard** (3:17)
Yeah, we're being a little bit radical lately, but it's working for us very well.

**Dan Lines** (3:21)
Because I was going to ask you a question, something like, hey, whatever methodology you are following, which seems to be some kind of mix that you'll explain, is it all your teams have to do the same thing? Or is it they decide themselves?
But you're saying you don't have teams now.

**Chris Downard** (3:41)
Well, we kind of refer to it as one team.

**Dan Lines** (3:44)
One team, okay.

**Chris Downard** (3:45)
Yeah, I don't think it would have worked well for us six months ago, honestly, to do this. I think it would have been too much chaos. But now it's a highly coordinated. What we found, especially in working remote, is that as we became real-time facilitators to unblock each other, we ended up kind of coalescing around like disciplines.
So, our team is primarily split into front end and back end, as far as skill sets. And while there are people that can kind of go back and forth, for the most part, you spend 80 to 100% of your time on the dominant one.
We don't prevent you from it. It's just kind of how it shakes out because we're moving really fast and that's where the focus is.

**Dan Lines** (4:30)
And so as we went remote and we had coffee talk and we had people, pro tip for everyone out there, if you want to increase collaboration and feel good vibes while everyone's remote, try Zoom coffee talk. So back on the dev methodology. So you're working as one team now.