ShriKant Vashishtha

Planning Poker is NOT about Agile Estimation!

One of the popular mechanisms to estimate story points as a team is planning poker exercise.

It’s an awesome technique but it may become a challenge for some teams. For instance, a team estimates story points separately as developers and testers. Later, they add up those points to arrive at resultant estimates.

Some teams get into endless discussions to ascertain if the estimate should have been 2 or 3, 5 or 8 or maybe 7.

It looks like, the primary goal of planning poker exercise is to arrive at the correct estimate.

But that’s not the point!

From Branch Merge Hell to Trunk-based Development – A Bank Agile Case Study 2/n

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

Lots of organizations are desperately trying to bring agility in their enterprise IT. In many such cases, enterprise IT stands on the worn pillars of traditional Waterfall process and legacy products.

The business in such orgs sees IT as a black hole where no business need can escape from inside it. The reason being, traditional process, and legacy systems take months of cycle time to deliver almost any business need.

This results in frustrated and desperate stakeholders who threaten to try anything or everything under the sun to get tangible outcomes.

This case-study is a story of a bank which was almost on the verge of outsourcing its entire IT. The bank since has moved on to become one of the pioneers in banking innovation space. The bank focuses to serve its customers with innovation and agility in its offerings.

In the first part of the case-study, we looked at the difficult conditions the team lived in. That was more to do with technical processes they used for handling multiple projects at the same time. This part focuses on how they moved on from the branch merge hell they lived in.

The Branch Merge Hell Team Lived With – A Bank Agile Case Study 1/n

by ShriKant Vashishtha 4 Comments

Lots of organizations are desperately trying to bring agility in their enterprise IT. In such cases, enterprise IT stands on the worn pillars of traditional Waterfall process and legacy products.

This results in a frustrated and desperate stakeholders who threaten to try anything or everything under the sun to get tangible outcomes.

This case-study is a story of a bank which was almost on the verge of outsourcing its entire IT. The bank since has moved on to become one of the pioneers in banking innovation space. It focuses to serve its customers every day with innovation and agility in a faster paced competitive ecosystem.
[Read more…] about The Branch Merge Hell Team Lived With – A Bank Agile Case Study 1/n

Collaborative Daily Scrum – Alternate to 3 Questions Based Daily Scrum

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

Scrum is inspired by Rugby Scrum. The entire development team works collaboratively towards one Sprint Goal.

Pretty obvious but still spelling out – Rugby Scrum can never be played individually in a team.

Working solo or without collaboration (read pair programming, swarming or mob-programming) is not even a choice in Scrum/XP.

With this background in mind, let’s focus on Daily Scrum.

Daily Scrum

Daily Scrum is a sprint planning in small. You replan the sprint every day. – James Coplien

A lot of Scrum teams use 3 questions based daily scrum. On the surface, it looks good but it comes with some inherent problems:

What Stops Scrum Teams from Self Organizing?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

One of the key indicators to know whether Scrum is working in a team comes from the fact if the team is self-organizing or not.
Before getting into the reasons on what stops teams to self-organize, let’s see the life without self-organization.