Agile Buddha - Page 8 - Demystifying Agile, Getting to its Core

Agile vs DevOps : Demystifying DevOps

Organisations are embracing DevOps which is great. However the whole adoption is causing a lot of confusion as well.

Some of you might have heard the term “Agile and DevOps”. With that it looks like Agile and DevOps are different. To over-simplify further people assume Agile is all about processes (like Scrum and Kanban) and DevOps is all about technical practices like CI, CD, Test Automation and Infrastructure Automation.

This is causing a lot of harm as some organizations now have Agile and DevOps as two separate streams as part of their enterprise Agile transformation. Agile by definitions disrupts silos and you see, in this case people are creating new silos in the name of Agile and DevOps.

With that background in mind, let’s try to understand what exactly DevOps is all about.
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Why “Definition of Ready” is Mandatory in Distributed Agile?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

In one of our earlier posts I discussed the elements and benefits of “Definition of Ready”. However it’s quite common to see totally opposite views of purists as they believe that Definition of Ready is not required at all.

I agree to their views to some extent if it’s all about collocated teams supported by dedicated product owner in the same time zone.

However, distributed Agile is a different beast altogether. It’s quite common in India to work with customers in opposite time-zones. Distributed communication essentially is an overhead. So the clarification which you receive in minutes face-to-face with collocated product-owner may require multiple iterations of distributed communication. Multiple iterations essentially mean multiple days.

So a READY user-story which could be finished in 2 hours now takes days to complete because of to and fro communication between distributed team-members to resolve unresolved queries.

Definition of Ready in such cases helps in bringing clarity and in keeping team members and product owner on the same page. Any absence of clarity essentially complicates the cycle time and throughput of a sprint.

More on Backlog Refinement, Story Points and Agile Estimation

This post is a part of a blog post series on story points and agile estimation. To read rest of the posts on the subject, please navigate to All About Story Points and Agile Estimation Series.

Jira and Agile : Using One Backend for Multiple Platforms

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

It’s common to have applications available for multiple platforms (web, Android and iOS) these days. In most cases, common backend services are used irrespective of the interface.

In such cases, it is tempting to have separate teams for backend and front-end interfaces. Unfortunately temptation in this case doesn’t help the business. It becomes very difficult to see the functional progress while having separate backend and frontend teams. On the surface, it looks like everyone is busy but in reality, the outcome can be frustrating with no production ready features.

The solution is to have functional cross-functional teams which could work on a vertical slice end-to-end. For instance, it’s ideal to have a team focused on iOS platform comprising both iOS and backend developers.

Makes sense, but then how to handle the redundancies as the same service may be useful for web as well?

Streamline Your UAT and DevOps – Kanban Boards

by Avienaash Shiralige 4 Comments

In my earlier post, we discussed using planning boards to improve your backlog planning and eventually to improve your planning flow. Main project workflow remained same.

Note: People landing on this post directly, please read earlier post to get context of the problem.

This team was using 2 week sprint model for execution. Often stories got completed(tested), but left on the scrum board UAT pending. All real users were on-field consultants, hence not easily available for UAT. This reduced team throughput(velocity). Team decided to change their approach and modify their definition-of-done. They decided to have a done column before UAT. Post demos relevant stories were moved to done. In-fact they did multiple demos to product owner all through out the sprint as stories got completed. They configured their execution scrum board as shown below.

Use Planning Board for Product Backlog Grooming

by Avienaash Shiralige 4 Comments

In our earlier post – Improve sprint throughput we had discussed about how important it is to have stories ready for play before team picks it as part of the sprint. In short, if half-cooked stories are pushed to sprints for execution, then team will spend lot of time analysing, re-working and this eventually reduces team throughput. To address this challenge, few of my teams thought of creating a separate planning board in Jira to track planning readiness. This board was used by PO primarily to keep a tab on the backlog and also by team members during backlog grooming session.

Team was using Atlasssian Jira, I will show here how we modified the workflow and boards within Jira. Some of the issues teams had faced with the backlog not being ready were:

Insufficient scenario analysis in user stories
Lack of functional and technical impact analysis
Not much details/mocks within the story
Team doing sizing estimate during sprint planning – this was the first time team was seeing those stories and hence made sprint planning long and inefficient

Hence a workflow was designed to address above issues. Take a look at the workflow below(pasting it from Jira).