Agile Buddha

Demystifying Agile, Getting to its Core

Spotify Scaled Agile Case-Study – Lessons For Smaller Teams

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A while back, Henrik Kniberg published an excellent case study on Scaling Agile @ Spotify. Though case study is specific to Agile scaling experiences at Spotify, some practices are equally important for smaller teams as well. This post tries to capture the essence from smaller team’s perspective.

Break Silos

A lot of organizations still works in functional silos.

For instance, in a bank, there may be one team for web banking, another team for home-loans and yet another one for mainframe based core-banking. Business features however in general cut across all these teams.

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Agile Thinking : How Can I Help You ?

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One of the key values of Agile is its focus on delivering working software or solution. This approach is the key catalyst of some behavioural, cultural, and structural changes.

The team members contribute to delivering working solution but their individual goals on their own don’t help the user much. For instance, just the UI part of a user-story is of no use to a user. If developers just focus on building the solution but not on the quality aspect, again it doesn’t result into product ready increment.

Essentially cross-functional team members have to collaborate and help each other to deliver the Sprint goal.
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Scrum Backlog: Epic, User Story, Acceptance Criteria

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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 evolution

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.

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Specification by Example | Behavior Driven Development | ATDD – A Google Hangout Interview

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Recently I got interviewed by DiscussAgile on a topic known by several names, i.e. Specification by Example, Behavior Driven Development or Acceptance Test Driven Development.

Here’s the Google Hangout recording available on YouTube.

Following topics got discussed as part of interview:

  1. Why to do ATTD?
  2. How to do it?
  3. What skills are needed to do it?
  4. Who should do it?
  5. How it relates with Test Driven Development?
  6. Tools to BDD/ATDD.
  7. How to start?

Enjoy and provide your feedback.