ShriKant Vashishtha

Agile vs DevOps : Demystifying DevOps

Organisations are embracing DevOps which is great. However the whole adoption is causing a lot of confusion as well.

Some of you might have heard the term “Agile and DevOps”. With that it looks like Agile and DevOps are different. To over-simplify further people assume Agile is all about processes (like Scrum and Kanban) and DevOps is all about technical practices like CI, CD, Test Automation and Infrastructure Automation.

This is causing a lot of harm as some organizations now have Agile and DevOps as two separate streams as part of their enterprise Agile transformation. Agile by definitions disrupts silos and you see, in this case people are creating new silos in the name of Agile and DevOps.

With that background in mind, let’s try to understand what exactly DevOps is all about.
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Why “Definition of Ready” is Mandatory in Distributed Agile?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

In one of our earlier posts I discussed the elements and benefits of “Definition of Ready”. However it’s quite common to see totally opposite views of purists as they believe that Definition of Ready is not required at all.

I agree to their views to some extent if it’s all about collocated teams supported by dedicated product owner in the same time zone.

However, distributed Agile is a different beast altogether. It’s quite common in India to work with customers in opposite time-zones. Distributed communication essentially is an overhead. So the clarification which you receive in minutes face-to-face with collocated product-owner may require multiple iterations of distributed communication. Multiple iterations essentially mean multiple days.

So a READY user-story which could be finished in 2 hours now takes days to complete because of to and fro communication between distributed team-members to resolve unresolved queries.

Definition of Ready in such cases helps in bringing clarity and in keeping team members and product owner on the same page. Any absence of clarity essentially complicates the cycle time and throughput of a sprint.

More on Backlog Refinement, Story Points and Agile Estimation

This post is a part of a blog post series on story points and agile estimation. To read rest of the posts on the subject, please navigate to All About Story Points and Agile Estimation Series.

Jira and Agile : Using One Backend for Multiple Platforms

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

It’s common to have applications available for multiple platforms (web, Android and iOS) these days. In most cases, common backend services are used irrespective of the interface.

In such cases, it is tempting to have separate teams for backend and front-end interfaces. Unfortunately temptation in this case doesn’t help the business. It becomes very difficult to see the functional progress while having separate backend and frontend teams. On the surface, it looks like everyone is busy but in reality, the outcome can be frustrating with no production ready features.

The solution is to have functional cross-functional teams which could work on a vertical slice end-to-end. For instance, it’s ideal to have a team focused on iOS platform comprising both iOS and backend developers.

Makes sense, but then how to handle the redundancies as the same service may be useful for web as well?

#noprojects with Cross Functional Feature Teams

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

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Sometimes #noprojects (deliver continuous change successfully without using a project) approach alone may not be enough for a software product. This is especially true for large enterprises where any valid business outcome requires close interactions of multiple software products.

In such cases, problem is how to resolve dependencies among software products. First approach which is also very common, is to agree upon a software interfacing contracts between software products. Each individual team then work in isolation while keeping other team’s software contract in mind. When done, teams integrate pieces together.
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The GQM Approach: A Framework for Defining and Measuring Effective Software Metrics

by ShriKant Vashishtha 4 Comments

Software metrics are important, as they tell you the transparent truth of software delivery. The question remains – which metrics should I use, and why?

Sometimes people just look for an available or known set of metrics and then add more as and when they discover anything new. But does it really make sense to try and apply those known metrics to any scenario?