Practice Agile

The Agile Ball Point Game

2011-12-18T20:48:00.001+05:30

This video demonstrates the Ball point game, a game to feel what it is to work in an Agile team. I facilitated this at PMI West Bengal chapter annual conference Aviskar.

Agile talk at PMI Mumbai Conclave 2011

2011-12-18T15:59:00.001+05:30

At PMI Mumbai Conclave 2011, I gave a talk on "Mitigating Risks with Agile Project Management". I am embedding videos for everyone's reference.

PMI Agile Certification: Filling a Gap in Industry (PMI Article: ManageIndia Volume 3 Issue 3)

2011-09-19T15:01:00.000+05:30

PMI Agile Certification: Filling a Gap in IndustryThe certification comes at a time when agile practices are gaining ground across IndiaKeep it flexible, keep it agile. Increasingly, organizations are realizing the need to keep their development processes open to change. If the market conditions are dynamic, shouldn’t the product development environment reflect the changing forces at work? With

PMI Agile (PMI-ACP) curriculum rocks!

2011-08-11T22:07:00.000+05:30

Finally, it’s good to see a solid and complete Agile curriculum. PMI has come up with new certification, PMI-ACP (Agile Certification Program) to test students on their Agile knowledge. PMI’s Agile exam will test student’s knowledge with 120 multi choice questions on all major Agile methodologies like Scrum, XP, Lean Kanban, Crystal, FDD, etc. What I find good about this exam is it is not

My talk @ SPIN Meet on Structured Agile Project Management Processes

2011-04-17T21:51:00.000+05:30

CSI SPIN - Mumbai(Software Process Improvement Network) When: Friday, May 6th 2011 6:00pm to 8:30pm Venue:CSI Mumbai ChapterE- 217, 2nd Floor. Floral Deck Plaza, Near Seepz, MIDC, Andheri (E) Mumbai 400093Ph: +91 22 28235476 / 28235548 We request you to please register at info@csimumbai.org, csimumbai@vsnl.com with cc to the underlined. For further details contact: Mr. R C Goyal, Member IEEE

Bay XP Meeting Part 2: Agile Estimation, Mike Cohn

2010-10-26T20:45:00.000+05:30

Bay XP Meeting Part 1: Agile Estimation, Mike Cohn

2010-10-26T20:02:00.000+05:30

The Pentagon Wars - A product management lesson

2010-10-06T19:01:00.000+05:30

Delivering features based on Business Value

2010-10-05T10:04:00.000+05:30

Agile software development emphasizes on delivering functionality on highest business value. What this means is, to prioritize the product backlog based on features that are most valuable to the end customers. I often give this example to new teams transitioning to Agile development. Taking "Microsoft Word" as an example, I ask the team if I consolidate overall functionality in Microsoft Word to

Diminishing ROI with NO Automation in Agile development

2010-10-03T16:58:00.000+05:30

My interaction with various clients that are in process of transitioning to Agile often ask this question - Is it ok to skip automated Unit and Acceptance testing and only perform manual testing? The reservation normally arises due to old school of thought where manual testing was tolerated and where CLIs and API needed for testing are normally an after thought. Sometimes it is also because QA

Template of task breakdown for a user story

2010-08-31T13:04:00.000+05:30

In a few Agile/Scrum training and coaching engagements that I have been involved with, I shared the template of ‘task breakdown for a user story' and found that teams find it very useful. This task list also defines ‘done’ criteria for the story. I am sharing the same template with everyone in this forum for your reference. As a rule of thumb, I recommend scrum teams to define a user story that

Wrong influences on Scrum teams.

2010-07-12T14:52:00.000+05:30

There is an inherent understanding in Agile implementation that Scrum is all about team and they have a final say on anything that impacts their productivity. To a certain extent this is true especially if you have only handful of possibly co-located scrum teams. However, in enterprise wide software development where you have dozens of distributed scrum teams external influences will start

Test Driven Development (TDD) vs Non TDD approach

2010-06-30T20:21:00.000+05:30

Recently I had a chat with one of my former colleagues on Test Driven Development (TDD), when he mentioned that writing test code prior to writing production code (TDD) vs writing test code after the code is written should fetch the same results. I disagreed with his statement and to prove my point I gave him following example which seemed to make sense to him and I thought might be worth sharing

Aligning Scrum Teams - Part 3: - Pulling it all together

2010-03-22T03:12:00.000+05:30

In the last 2 blogs I discussed the challenges with component based distributed teams and how to overcome those challenges with solid pre-planning. This is the final of the 3 part blogs where I want to discuss how to pull everything together. Once a solid pre-plan is done, it's time to zero in on the iteration goal a.k.a. the 'Macro' goal (A common goal shared for the iteration by each scrum

Aligning Scrum Teams - Part 2: - The Pre-planning

2010-03-10T10:11:00.000+05:30

The Part 1 blog discussed the challenges one might face with multiple component based scrum teams. In this blog let me discuss a solution to make these enterprise scrums deliver consistent results. To start with, the team would need a solid pre-planning to put various dots in place before the actual planning happens. It's in fact more than thatDefine goals - This is a big ticket item and you

Aligning Scrum Teams - Part 1: - The Challenges

2010-03-04T09:26:00.000+05:30

Let me start this blog with an example - The goal of the next sprint is to deliver integrated functionality of features f1, f2, and f3 by scrum teams s1, s2 and s3. If scrums teams are organized as Feature Teams (i.e. Scrum team formed with experienced members from UI, DB, Server, Testing components), it is very easy to divide the work as each team is contained and self sufficient to deliver the

Adding new members to a scrum team -- does it Help or Hurt?

2010-02-17T08:15:00.001+05:30

Consider a scrum team (component teams) operating in a producer-consumer model, catering to requests made by multiple consumers in each sprint. This team, based on their capacity and velocity, can deliver a fixed set of stories in each sprint. Which means that it is going to starve consumers if it cant keep up with their demands. In such circumstances there is a common perception that if more

Sprint Burndown says a lot about your scrum team...

2010-02-10T06:12:00.000+05:30

A Burndown chart is the graphical representation of amount of work left to do (y-axis) versus time (x-axis) and can help get a good heart-beat on how a scrum team is performing. Some questions that Burndown can help us answer are:How good is this team with the planning? How well is this team executing against the planned stories in a Sprint? Is this team self-organized and are they

When should QA be engaged in an iteration?

2009-11-22T06:41:00.000+05:30

Someone going through my blog recently emailed me a question about when QA should be engaged in an iteration - should it be in the middle of the iteration or should it be at the end of the iteration? I believe the hidden question that the gentleman had was, what can QA accomplish in the very first few days of the iteration, while development is busy designing interfaces and coding to stories?

Making Release prediction on an Agile Project?

2009-11-10T09:36:00.000+05:30

Let me show a very easy way of how a release can be predicted using an example. Let's say, for a particular product under development, there are 5 scrum teams. Each team has special expertise and they contribute to a very specific area of the product i.e. UI, Infra, Security, etc. For this exercise also assume there are 20 epics that need to be developed before the product can be shipped to the

Agile Retrospectives...

2009-11-06T07:50:00.000+05:30

Recently I conducted an iteration Retrospective for one of the Scrum teams which resulted in a good discussion. The feedback helped in making some specific decisions for the team. These decisions had to be communicated to management as this team decided to do things a bit differently than other teams. One question raised by management was if the Retrospective notes could be shared with everyone

My inferences from Agilepalooza - A Question on Legacy code

2009-11-05T07:26:00.002+05:30

Let's continue this blog on the theme of AgilePalooza discussions... I had a question on what is the correct way to handle legacy code that is inherited by the team that has no unit and integration tests? How does the team confirm that any new feature being developed has not introduced regression into the legacy code base? Should the team spend time in developing integration tests for legacy

My inferences from AgilePalooza

2009-11-04T06:31:00.001+05:30

It’s been a while that I have posted a blog and I had promised myself today to put my thoughts on events over the past week or so. First off, things are getting too busy at work with new assignment of Scrum Master Duties, in addition to a full plate of work I already had. But no complains there as I enjoy being a scrum master and eventually what matters is the satisfaction I get on the

Challenges with Daily Stand-ups...

2009-10-21T08:02:00.000+05:30

As a Scrum Master did you ever face these situations where The daily stand-ups ran for more than 15 minutes? The Chickens interrupted the stand-ups or took it over? The issues concerning only 2 parties were resolved at stand-ups rather than being discussed offline or after stand-ups? The team members gave scrum updates to the Scrum Master rather than the team A team member gave

Let's talk iteration planning meeting.

2009-10-09T08:46:00.001+05:30

The iteration planning meetings are the most important meetings for the iteration to be successful. These are the meetings where the team plans for the work to be done in the upcoming weeks. But somehow I have not heard or read much about how these meetings should be conducted. Most of the books and websites just mention to have two 4 hour sessions for planning meetings. What really happens in