About - Agile Is Easy

About Me

I am Andre Castillo, an agile purist, enthusiast, and evangelist. I find that I enjoy working on, in and with engineering teams, especially in start ups, helping build collaborative, adaptable and agile workflows. I find that working agile is a great way to make software products and to do it sustainably. I like bucking the trend of working teams to the bone, till teams are burnt out using sprints. I’d rather build a team of motivated individuals that enjoy coming to work everyday and can feel good about coming back the next day, and the next day.

I’m not a particularly eloquent author, I haven’t written any books, I haven’t given any major talks, made any YouTube videos, or created any podcasts. I’m just a normal, everyday Joe who enjoys being an Engineering Manager, and needs a place to share some of what I’ve learned.

What’s This Site All About

AgileIsEasy.com is my first real jump into making a site where I can share some of my knowledge and insights into what I think being agile is all about. For right now, it’s a blog. I do have some intentions of making it something more. If I haven’t already, the idea will be to let users take some quick quizzes with some very practical advice and answers.

I’ve found over the years in my agile journey, that one of the hardest things about being “agile”, is that it’s not easy to define. And a side effect of that is that there aren’t a lot of very practical hands on examples of what any manager or individual contributor should do in any particular situation. The entire agile industry is basically a bunch of road signs, but no detailed maps. I understand why of course, it’s because being agile is different for different teams, different products, different situations. But, what is also true is that a lot of teams face very similar, if not exactly the same, problems. There are agile ways of handling those problems and building good practices, ways that I’ve had to learn, and only guess whether or not it was agile.

It’s my hope to use this site to provide practical agile implementation strategies and advice. I’ll do my best to provide real world examples of issues I’ve faced, or have heard others have faced, and how they solved or overcame them while following agile principles.