Avienaash Shiralige

Webinar: How to Deal with Emergencies in a Lean/Scrum Team

Every Agile team has to deal with different emergencies next to their regular work. Every team dream of achieving sustainable pace comes with nightmares of production emergencies/defects, support and maintenance tasks within a sprint which takes focus completely off the sprint goals. The goal of this webinar is to see different approaches team can take to absorb a reasonable amount of uncertainty, striking balance between robustness and speed within the sprint.

Also we will discuss about how to deal with “Pivot” in lean product development. In this state, product has to go through a course correction in terms of vision, market segment and features. This is almost an emergency on business side. In webinar, we will see how engineering teams need to do course correction in their approach too.

Audience will learn:

How to plan for production emergencies during a sprint
How to apply strategic and tactical thinking to handle changes
How engineering team needs to deal with development when product is in Pivot

If this sounds interesting to you, please register for the webinar here. Do share with others too!

Webinar Timings: Wed, May 13, 2015 9:30 PM – 10:30 PM IST

Agile Testing is achieving quality in everything

by Avienaash Shiralige 1 Comment

We know “Testing As An Activity” is important, and why we should all test. The old axiom that “Testers Test and Programmers Code” is so outdated now and everyone needs to change. Testers are the testing experts in a team, and can help enable the whole team to own quality but they are certainly not the only one’s who should be testing. Like, developers need to contribute towards testing by unit testing their code and also pair testing to minimize defects and minimize test – defect-fix cycle.

Testing in agile, addresses the processes that produce software and also products of those processes. Hence I ask my teams to not just focus on validating software after development, but also check processes that produce software like, quality of stories, requirement/impact analysis, acceptance criteria(using behavior-driven-development to address “3 amigos problem), and more.

Take a look at our agile testing workshop which is a detailed 2 day course which focusses on test automation strategies, lean approach to defect prevention, various tools and techniques to automate, BDD(behavior-driven-development) and how to use various frameworks – Linear Scripting, Test Library Architecture, Data-Driven Testing, Keyword/Table-Driven and Hybrid automation frameworks.

Appraisals in an Agile Company – Part 2

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

In our last post, we discussed about how to break performance measures into team and individual measures to bring more team behavior orientations into appraisals.

Today, let’s talk about addressing other two issues: feedback frequency and how to make feedback effective.

Agile thinking is based on building frequent feedback loops within your teams and organization. Few examples of frequent feedback loops are:

Sprint demos every couple of weeks, to get product feedback
Sprint retros to get process and tool feedback
TDD/BDD/continuos integration to get code feedback
Continuous testing to get quality feedback. Check-out our new launched 2 day extensive workshop on agile way of testing

Appraisals in an Agile Company – Part 1

by Avienaash Shiralige 4 Comments

Appraisals! How many of you dread this word? This is the only time in the year that you get to bargain for salary increments, everyone end-up negotiating to their best. Appraisals are closely connected with salary raise/increments, bonus payouts and it’s feedback intent takes the backseat.

There are three major issues with traditional approach to appraisal:

Measuring and rewarding individual behaviors and contributions OVER team based measurements.
Long appraisal cycle(mostly once a year) discussing both salary increments and feedback.
Feedback process – Filling long appraisals forms with least discussions between reviewers about reviewee.

Agile Contracting: Discovery, Fixed Budget, Variable Scope

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

We discussed about committing fixed number of story points and swapping any additional scope with existing backlog in our previous post “Agile for Fixed Bid Projects“. This is a great way to maximize value with minimal change in timelines and budget. This works well when there is a trust existing between product and engineering, and client/product team understands this agile approach. Still, fixing size, undermines one major aspect of an agile team – “applying learning back into the project”. Development teams while doing size estimation give higher points where there are uncertainties and risks. Known unknowns, new technology, unclear requirements etc. are few reasons for providing higher story points. As project progresses, teams get more knowledgeable (both technology and business) and hence some tasks now look smaller than before.