Scrum

Story Mapping and/vs Process Maps

One of the key philosophies of Agile software development is to have information radiators visible on the wall so that the progress of the team as well as what team currently is working on gets clearly visible to anybody who visits to the team area. That includes stakeholders, project managers, team or anybody from the organisation.

However, haven’t you observed that many times, as you look at the card-wall (Scrum Board), things are not very clear to you. Card wall may look like the mesh of user-stories with statuses in To Do, In Progress or Done. However some of the bigger questions are not clearly answered by just looking at user-stories.

Agile Offshore: Why Distributed Demo / Showcase is so Important?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

Demo is an integral and important part of Scrum ceremonies. Important because that’s the whole point of being Agile. You get early feedback from Product Owner and stakeholders and fine-tune the product if required. Also this is sometimes the only occasion for offshore team when sponsors and business actually get to see the real contribution of offshore team. There are valid reasons also when someone from onsite team gives the demo. They include:

Language problem. I worked with a French team in which stakeholders and business were more at ease to talk in French.
Completely opposite time-zones which may not allow a lot of collaboration.

The advantages of distributed demo far outweighs the ones of onsite demo.

Agile is Genchi-Genbutsu: Go, See and Confirm

by Avienaash Shiralige 4 Comments

Genchi-Genbutsu is the Japanese expression for a practice of finding your answers right down at the source, rather than relying on second-hand reports or charts of data to achieve true understanding. This practice emphasizes going to a place(gemba) where you watch, observe and ask “WHY” five times. I shared few posts earlier on 5 Whys.

Most of the time we are hidden in our project plans and design documents to find root causes. Traditional methods assumed that having a great plan and good documentation is the secret to project success. They alienated themselves from implementation and real world.

Agile, on the other hand, believes in delivering some thing early on to confirm our understanding. It inherits the expression Genchi-Genbutsu.

Agile Offshore: Create Effective and Decisive Product Owner Proxy to Offshore Team

by Avienaash Shiralige 6 Comments

Off-shoring in current market is a global economic and strategic need. Building Agile Offshore teams across boundaries and time zones is a different ball game. It has its fair share of challenges to work with. I shared few of those challenges and a possible approach to take in my earlier articles.

1. How to Address People and Communication Challenges
2.Distributed Agile:10 Best Practices of Successful Teams
3. Distributed Scrum: A Day In The Life Of A Distributed Team

You need to make few changes along your way to your normal routine to make it work. One challenge I often see is integration of offshore team with onshore team and to project/business vision.

Agile Principle: Simplicity – The Art of Maximising the Work Not Done

by Avienaash Shiralige 19 Comments

Simplicity at work – I h’ve always wondered what does this mean to me, to my team and to my organization. In my quest to know more, I asked this to many Agile Coaches and enthusiasts on various groups.

In this post, I like to share what I understood and gathered from my interaction with these people: Steve Ash, Charles Bradley, Lynn Shrewsbury, Ruud Rietveld, Philip Ledgerwood, John Hebley, Jeff McKenna, George Dinwiddie, Adam Sroka, Michael James, Matt Anderson and Cass Dalton.

[pullquote]Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. ~ Leonardo da Vinci[/pullquote]

Decluttering is a consequence of Simplicity. Simplicity leads to:

Decluttering of products.
Decluttering of your mind. Not being manipulative – being honest, open and trustworthy.
Decluttering your workspace, working in open spaces.

[pullquote]Scrum philosophy of working in small teams, small sprints, small stories imbibe simplicity thinking – Thoughtful reduction.[/pullquote]

The desirability of simplicity is sometimes expressed as the KISS Principle.

Do today only what you absolutely need to do today. No ‘future-proofing’. No ‘gold-plating’.
Achieve Just Barely Good Enough (JBGE). JBGE is actually the most effective possible.

Thanks to Scott Ambler for sharing this term JBGE. You could read more about this in my earlier post Agility is About Identifying and Achieving “Good Enough”

There is a point in time when any additional effort put into work product will increase its cost without increasing its value. If not zero, the increase in value may be insignificant compared with the increase in cost. This is the point to stop! (Achieving JBGE).