Scrum

Lean Product Development: Dealing with Business Emergency

We all know biggest risk in the product development is building a WRONG product. There are numerous examples from history to see why some products did not see light of the day or big success.

Recently, I came across a product team which took MVP approach and built a product which saw very good initial success. But with time product was unable to keep the users engaged and convert initial success to revenue to keep it floating.

Some of the questions the team started to deliberate were:

Is this a good product idea but a targeting wrong market segment….? OR
We are in right user segment but not a right product/idea – the one which does not solve user problems completely.

Scrum Backlog: Epic, User Story, Acceptance Criteria

by Avienaash Shiralige 3 Comments

Often, I get to hear questions about level of details that need to go in the product backlog stories. How detailed should be the acceptance criteria? or how small the story should be? We all know stories matures with time. I really like this post on user story life-cycle. Please take time to read this. Let’s consider an example now.

User Story example: As a Project Owner(PO), I should be able to transfer complete project ownership to my connection, with my role remaining to be just a project creator(author) after transfer.

Note: At the first sight, it is tough to say whether this is a story or an epic. When this story comes up in backlog grooming meeting, teams might completely miss the magnitude of such stories. Hence, as the product becomes bigger it is wise to start detailing stories by adding acceptance criteria earlier in grooming meetings itself. Impact of every new story gets wider as product becomes bigger which often gets missed by the team.

Webinar: How to Deal with Emergencies in a Lean/Scrum Team

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

Every Agile team has to deal with different emergencies next to their regular work. Every team dream of achieving sustainable pace comes with nightmares of production emergencies/defects, support and maintenance tasks within a sprint which takes focus completely off the sprint goals. The goal of this webinar is to see different approaches team can take to absorb a reasonable amount of uncertainty, striking balance between robustness and speed within the sprint.

Also we will discuss about how to deal with “Pivot” in lean product development. In this state, product has to go through a course correction in terms of vision, market segment and features. This is almost an emergency on business side. In webinar, we will see how engineering teams need to do course correction in their approach too.

Audience will learn:

How to plan for production emergencies during a sprint
How to apply strategic and tactical thinking to handle changes
How engineering team needs to deal with development when product is in Pivot

If this sounds interesting to you, please register for the webinar here. Do share with others too!

Webinar Timings: Wed, May 13, 2015 9:30 PM – 10:30 PM IST

Agile Testing is achieving quality in everything

by Avienaash Shiralige 1 Comment

We know “Testing As An Activity” is important, and why we should all test. The old axiom that “Testers Test and Programmers Code” is so outdated now and everyone needs to change. Testers are the testing experts in a team, and can help enable the whole team to own quality but they are certainly not the only one’s who should be testing. Like, developers need to contribute towards testing by unit testing their code and also pair testing to minimize defects and minimize test – defect-fix cycle.

Testing in agile, addresses the processes that produce software and also products of those processes. Hence I ask my teams to not just focus on validating software after development, but also check processes that produce software like, quality of stories, requirement/impact analysis, acceptance criteria(using behavior-driven-development to address “3 amigos problem), and more.

Take a look at our agile testing workshop which is a detailed 2 day course which focusses on test automation strategies, lean approach to defect prevention, various tools and techniques to automate, BDD(behavior-driven-development) and how to use various frameworks – Linear Scripting, Test Library Architecture, Data-Driven Testing, Keyword/Table-Driven and Hybrid automation frameworks.

Appraisals in an Agile Company – Part 2

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

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