shop & scan status

Agile at Meijer

Meijer is an excellent company. When recruiting other developers to work there, my main sales pitch, "we do agile right." 

Meijer has invested a large amount of money in training everyone involved in the development process. Not just the developers but all management. Not only that, but it's enforced and taken seriously.

Part of agile at Meijer is Hackathonds. At the end of each program increment, there are two weeks spent on grooming the next increment, inspecting and adapting the previous, and everyone (not just developers) are allowed to work on whatever they want that is business-related. 

Is shop and scan down?

There are a lot of pieces involved in rolling out something as complex as shop & scan. It started as a pilot in one store, then rolling out to other stores in batches. When problems were reported initially, it went something like this. 

• Store calls support at corporate

• Corporate calls product owner

• The product owner calls me.

Then I would trace down what was failing, inform the product owner. 

This process is inefficient, of course. The failure was never the App; once released, it was static; not much could fail other than network issues. 

The failure would typically be a service failure (outside of network failure). To find out what service would be acting up, this App was created to attempt to use each one and show a smiley/frowny face on success/failure.

On the one hand, the App is relatively small, but on the other, this allowed the process to reduce the chain of phone calls, and people involved.

It shows how giving a little time pays back the company in solutions that would not have been introduced otherwise.