ShriKant Vashishtha

FAQ: Why Story points? Why not map story points with time? What’s the issue?

As long as customer isn’t interested in throughput or customer trusts the team, whatever way you size or estimate doesn’t really matter. But that doesn’t happen very often. Whenever customer questions about team throughput, it becomes challenging to answer using hour-based estimation as time taken to complete any particular task deflates over time.

Some teams follow capacity based estimation technique where they identify the number of hours available in a team for the entire sprint duration. Based on that they pick up stories in a sprint. Again here as well, there is absolutely no way to know any change in team throughput as size for which capacity is defined isn’t defined.
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Traditional Testing will be Dead Soon!!

by ShriKant Vashishtha 12 Comments

Repeated software-development tasks are becoming automated through the application of Continuous Delivery and DevOps. If developers are taking more and more testing responsibilities into their hands, I wonder what will be the role of traditional (manual **only**) testing and testers moving forward?

Spotify Scaled Agile Case-Study – Lessons For Smaller Teams

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A while back, Henrik Kniberg published an excellent case study on Scaling Agile @ Spotify. Though case study is specific to Agile scaling experiences at Spotify, some practices are equally important for smaller teams as well. This post tries to capture the essence from smaller team’s perspective.

Break Silos

A lot of organizations still works in functional silos.

For instance, in a bank, there may be one team for web banking, another team for home-loans and yet another one for mainframe based core-banking. Business features however in general cut across all these teams.

Continuous Inspection Session on YouTube

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Last month I did a session on “Continuous Inspection – How to define, measure and continuously improve code quality?” in DiscussAgile conference.

The session is available on Youtube now. Enjoy and feel free to ask questions related to the subject.

Agile Thinking : How Can I Help You ?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 2 Comments

One of the key values of Agile is its focus on delivering working software or solution. This approach is the key catalyst of some behavioural, cultural, and structural changes.

The team members contribute to delivering working solution but their individual goals on their own don’t help the user much. For instance, just the UI part of a user-story is of no use to a user. If developers just focus on building the solution but not on the quality aspect, again it doesn’t result into product ready increment.

Essentially cross-functional team members have to collaborate and help each other to deliver the Sprint goal.
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