Agile

Appraisals in an Agile Company – Part 2

In our last post, we discussed about how to break performance measures into team and individual measures to bring more team behavior orientations into appraisals.

Today, let’s talk about addressing other two issues: feedback frequency and how to make feedback effective.

Agile thinking is based on building frequent feedback loops within your teams and organization. Few examples of frequent feedback loops are:

Sprint demos every couple of weeks, to get product feedback
Sprint retros to get process and tool feedback
TDD/BDD/continuos integration to get code feedback
Continuous testing to get quality feedback. Check-out our new launched 2 day extensive workshop on agile way of testing

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.

Appraisals in an Agile Company – Part 1

by Avienaash Shiralige 4 Comments

Appraisals! How many of you dread this word? This is the only time in the year that you get to bargain for salary increments, everyone end-up negotiating to their best. Appraisals are closely connected with salary raise/increments, bonus payouts and it’s feedback intent takes the backseat.

There are three major issues with traditional approach to appraisal:

Measuring and rewarding individual behaviors and contributions OVER team based measurements.
Long appraisal cycle(mostly once a year) discussing both salary increments and feedback.
Feedback process – Filling long appraisals forms with least discussions between reviewers about reviewee.

Agile Contracting: Discovery, Fixed Budget, Variable Scope

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

We discussed about committing fixed number of story points and swapping any additional scope with existing backlog in our previous post “Agile for Fixed Bid Projects“. This is a great way to maximize value with minimal change in timelines and budget. This works well when there is a trust existing between product and engineering, and client/product team understands this agile approach. Still, fixing size, undermines one major aspect of an agile team – “applying learning back into the project”. Development teams while doing size estimation give higher points where there are uncertainties and risks. Known unknowns, new technology, unclear requirements etc. are few reasons for providing higher story points. As project progresses, teams get more knowledgeable (both technology and business) and hence some tasks now look smaller than before.

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.