Yesterday was my last day at Dell, Inc. I was with the company for 4 years and did my best to push Agile methods including Test-Driven Development in the CMM-crazy enterprise. I'm now a Senior Software Engineer for Pluck. Pluck is a company with several business lines around RSS and content aggregation. There is a C++ team here, and a .Net team. I'm obviously on the .Net team, and it's an Agile shop whose practices are a mix of several Agile tracks.
Speaking of Agile, the AgileATX (ATX is for Austin, TX) group is meeting for lunch today at the Mongolian BBQ on N Lamar just south of Rundberg at 11:30AM. If you are in the Austin area, check it out. You can also subscribe to the AgileATX Yahoo! group.
Microsoft has a whole new reputation now that so many employees are blogging. There is a new face to the company, and it's a good one. Information is flowing more freely, and I think the community is more comfortable with Microsoft now. The environment at Dell isn't like that. For one, it's mostly a manufacturing or assembling company that produces computers and accessories. The IT department is only a few thousand people, and the minority are software developers. Second, management isn't comfortable being that open, so I wasn't free to talk about what's going on inside the company.
At Pluck, I hope to be very open. We have several consumer products that I'll be talking about. Pluck is a software company, so I expect it to be very different. The first thing I noticed was the free drinks. For the last 4 years, I've had to get my Dr. Pepper from a vending machine! :-)