ShriKant Vashishtha

Distributed Agile Patterns – Presentation @AgileIndia2015 Live

This year I delivered a presentation on “Distributed Agile Patterns” in Agile India conference held in Bangalore based on different patterns evolved or discovered during my Agile journey.

The video is available now. You may want to have a look and provide your feedback.

Continuous Inspection : How to Define, Measure and Continuously Improve Code Quality?

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

One of the basic but important customer expectations is – the software product should be of very good quality. That makes sense as well. However, what exactly “good quality” means?

Here are characteristics of good quality software:

Printing Physical Scrum Board From Atlassian Jira

by ShriKant Vashishtha 6 Comments

It’s well known fact that physical Scrum Boards provide many benefits over their electronic counterpart.

With physical boards current sprint state is transparently visible to anybody in the team and to the stakeholders. As a team member you no longer are required to explain someone what exactly the team is focusing on right now as anyone can look at physical board at any point of time. Also, during standup, story-card and sprint progress get more attention than individual progress. You can setup your physical board the way you want and you don’t have to work around the limitation of any electronic tool.

Agile for Fixed Price Contracts

by ShriKant Vashishtha 6 Comments

The basic premise of Scrum is to help in developing complex software through an incremental and iterative approach based on regular feedback. The feedback comes from sprint review as part of the Increment inspection. That may translate into adaptation in Product Backlog if needed. Agile manifesto has a key tenet around change, i.e. “Responding to change over following a plan”.

Fixed-price projects are all about fixed scope, money and time. In such a contradictory scenario, the question is, how should we accommodate continual changes in the Product Backlog?

Is it even possible to work in a fixed price Agile mode? If so, how?

This post outlines the most common challenges in executing fixed price Agile projects. It also suggests ways to handle them.

Agile Thinking : Stop Starting, Start Finishing

by ShriKant Vashishtha 13 Comments

Limiting “Work in Process” (WIP) items is one of key ideas of Kanban. A natural outcome of it, inherently coming from Lean philosophy is to stop starting and start finishing.

By having too many work in process items, it looks like everybody is busy but there is no functional outcome for the end user. So, instead, it’s important to work towards completing the user-story.

From the outset it looks like, “Stop starting, start finishing” philosophy is limited to Lean and Kanban world. Scrum world is either doing it well or doesn’t need it. Right?

Wrong!!!

Let’s take a look at a typical Scrum standup.