Agile in the Workplace: Personal Technical Experience Under Agile at a Fintech Startup | The Social and Personal Implications of the Agile Coding Methodologies on Computer Science Workplaces

1787fp is a fintech startup located in McLean, VIrginia, existing under a proprietary application–1787fp. This app serves as a financial planning tool targeted towards young adults. I served in a technical internship at the startup, primarily refactoring the app. Here, I utilized my own coding knowledge to work directly with the Xamarin.Forms framework and AWS tools in working in a small engineering team, getting hands-on experience with agile methodology–and the pitfalls with the methodology’s implementation. The internship was successful, and moving forward, the application was to be recreated using another framework, adding more features.

Agile is the primary workplace methodology presently used within the programming industry; agile relies on cyclical, incremental development, prioritizing speed and efficiency, due to the increased demand of projects, contrasting greatly to its predecessor, the waterfall model–a methodology that relies greatly on planning and finite measurement. This creates inexplicit difficulties for workplaces implementing agile. This thesis examines the agile methodology in its implementation to the computer science workplace. Investigation requires us to look into the general agile experience provided by experienced managers and engineers alongside my own personal technical experience. We will study interactions among actors in an overarching project. These actors can be interpreted as components of a project, pertaining to outputs, demands, and employee experience. Agile, counterintuitively, has considerably been difficult to manage by experienced employees, as adjustments actually shifted work environments considerably. With this also came geographical shifts and the inability to properly measure results. Though there is no direct solution to answer these challenges, it is crucial to point out the inadequacies of the current methodology and limit difficulties it may produce.