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ShriKant Vashishtha

Why do We Need Software Metrics?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 3 Comments

Why Software Metrics

Humans mostly have a tendency to go by their gut feeling. At the same time, machines mostly don’t tell a lie as their only job is to emit the necessary information.

That’s the reason people like me are scared of weighing machine as that could break the myth of my handsomeness 🙂 . Your family may be insisting you to go for full body health check up, but many fear from them as well.

Those tests will transparently tell you if anything et-all is wrong with your health. If yes, you may take corrective actions. Many people don’t go for them as they don’t want to hear bad news about their health.

You see, truth many times is beyond perceptions and feelings. Something mechanically or electronically measured is beyond feelings and is sheer truth.

Like a health checkup, software projects should also be checked for the performance of their vital organs (parameters). So that if something is wrong, that could be fixed.

Now someone may misinterpret the first Agile Manifesto tenet “Individual and Interactions OVER Process and Tools” in form of “Individual and interactions INSTEAD OF process and tools” and say, “Hey! We are doing Agile. So we don’t need Metrics. That’s so old age!”.

However truth can’t be fictionalized as has been proven in many Lean Startup experiments. Without facts, there can’t be any validated learning. Without validated learning, you never know whether your MVP is good or not.

In software development as well, one needs facts to validate the vital parameters of project delivery.

Distributed Agile Patterns : Define Overlap Time

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

Distributed Agile teams are reality these days. For sure there are overheads. But it’s all about trade-off between ‘distributed Agile overheads’ vs combination of availability of talent at any given time, scaling teams at will and lower cost.

Communication overheads are mitigated through phone/Skype/hangout calls with screen-share. It’s usual for people to do remote pair programming. However many times, collaboration fails.

Distributed members/stakeholders are not available in time. Work, which could be finished within hours takes days/weeks of cycle time in to-and-fro communication. Product Owner is a busy person all the time. Getting hold of her becomes a very difficult task.

How to mitigate these challenges?

[Read more…] about Distributed Agile Patterns : Define Overlap Time

The Secret Mantra for Agile Success

by ShriKant Vashishtha 3 Comments

top-secret2 (1)

People move to Agile, go through required training and start working in projects. After a period of time, if you ask any team member, “what exactly is Agile?”, she’ll start talking about Scrum ceremonies, embracing change, shorter feedback cycle etc. Even after implementing all these aspects, you’ll find issues in that project.

Why?

[Read more…] about The Secret Mantra for Agile Success

Enterprise Agile Transformation – Are You Able to See Big Elephant?

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

elephant-blind-men-600px

Implementing Agile in a big enterprise is not an easy task. The metaphor I sometimes use for big enterprise is to compare it with Elephant. It’s very easy for a small living being to move and maneuver. However when it comes to elephant, it requires time to build momentum and when it actually moves, it moves slowly.

People involved in Agile transformation get frustrated because of all perceived delays. Frustration is understandable but not sure if much can be done other than understanding the simple reality that you are dealing with an elephant and not a tiger or mouse.
[Read more…] about Enterprise Agile Transformation – Are You Able to See Big Elephant?

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

by ShriKant Vashishtha 3 Comments


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.
[Read more…] about FAQ: Why Story points? Why not map story points with time? What’s the issue?

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