Many people would probably ask why I didn't leave too, and it would be a fair question. I liked the company and most of the people who worked with me, and I thought I would be able to push the organization back to agile practices. I tried to stick it out and fight for all the right things. Because of my tenure with the company and the projects I had been involved in, I knew the company and its business pretty well. This experience gave my voice a little weight with the development teams, so I would encourage things like unit testing and small releases when opportunities presented themselves.
During this time, many new developers to the team would come to me for help. As often as I could, I would try to sit side-by-side with them to work through issues, discuss design, and help them grow in their skills. I learned how to adjust my communication to deliver ideas to different audiences*. I also learned how to communicate new technologies and technical concepts to developers. Even though we weren't following an agile methodology, I was growing and improving.
The company got into a mindset that it wanted to buy software to handle many of the big projects, and use custom software development to integrate the larger packages with each other. I found myself doing a lot of maintenance work and being assigned to integration projects. The integration projects were OK, but because of the personnel assignments, I wasn't heavily utilized. The maintenance work was good because I exercised my unit testing muscles, but they didn't offer a lot of growth in new technologies. As much as I liked the company and what it did, I progressed to the realization that I wasn't growing as much as I could be.
Even though I wasn't immersed in agile practices, I learned and developed quite a bit. Skills such as communication, mentoring, unit testing, integration testing, quality testing, and learning the business would become crucial to success at my next company.
* This is still an area of improvement for me.
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