About Jelmar Van Aert

Hi there! I'm Jelmar.

I've been a Scrum Master since 2020. I started my journey at FWO as a Software Developer. While working on the migration of a web application, I saw that the communication between team members needed to be improved and that the project's stakeholders were not included in the development of the product.

That seemed like there were better ways to deliver the value we were building. But as a junior developer, I did not know where to start. I've learned about agile software development at school but not how to introduce it to a team.

I started by introducing Azure DevOps to the team. We were working with an on-premise TFS and not utilizing git. TFS has the drawback that other team members cannot edit the same file for their work when a file is checked out.

The second step was introducing the build pipelines in Azure DevOps. Releases were still manual tasks that utilized our valuable time and were error-prone.

Now that we had this setup, I introduced Pull Requests to the greenfield project. This enabled us to see how the code was changing and allowed us to ask questions about the changes we'd made.

I know, we're not working Agile yet. But this gave me some credit to the team that we can improve our current situation.

In 2020, disaster struck our team and the world. Corona made us all work full-time from home. While we communicated at the office, this all vaporized when we worked from home. We had no clear system for the way we worked. Then I got a phone call from my manager from dotNET lab asking if I would like to become the Scrum Master of the team. My mentor at dotNET lab coached me throughout the first months while I dove with my nose into the SCRUM books.

At that time, we were with eight developers. For the first three sprints, we tried out SCRUM with all the developers working on migrating the web application.

And this was a success!

We included the other developers to create the entire SCRUM team. The success didn't stop there; our IT department grew from eight people to eighteen people! We made three teams, two SCRUM teams, and one Kanban support team, of which I am the Scrum Master.

I helped the team become self-organizing with a musketeer attitude.

Feel free to contact me through LinkedIn or Twitter, and let's chat about all things SCRUM!