agile

The Secret Mantra for Agile Success

People move to Agile, go through required training and start working in projects. After a period of time, if you ask any team member, “what exactly is Agile?”, she’ll start talking about Scrum ceremonies, embracing change, shorter feedback cycle etc. Even after implementing all these aspects, you’ll find issues in that project.

Why?

Enterprise Agile Transformation – Are You Able to See Big Elephant?

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

Implementing Agile in a big enterprise is not an easy task. The metaphor I sometimes use for big enterprise is to compare it with Elephant. It’s very easy for a small living being to move and maneuver. However when it comes to elephant, it requires time to build momentum and when it actually moves, it moves slowly.

People involved in Agile transformation get frustrated because of all perceived delays. Frustration is understandable but not sure if much can be done other than understanding the simple reality that you are dealing with an elephant and not a tiger or mouse.
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Sustainable Pace: Does Culture Play Any Role At All ?

by Avienaash Shiralige 11 Comments

Striving to bring agility into the organisation to adapt to changing business conditions is leading people to lose sleep and stretch more than before in some organisations. Agile thought leaders definitely envisioned this and hence recognised sustainability as one of the agile principles.

[pullquote] Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. [/pullquote]

To run a long distance you need to find a sustainable pace. But often, companies just don’t get this due to various reasons like:

Pressure from business and management to get most work from least people
Team not having an option to make their own decisions – command and control culture
Teams inability to say NO for non-realistic goals. Service industry firms – they just can’t say NO to unreasonable client demands
Utilisation of people – Planning for 100% utilisation. This makes people work for more than required hours and hence getting burnout
Unable to remove distractions to the team. Lot of unplanned, non-essential meetings taking people’s time. Questioning motives and saying NO is essential here.
Allocating people on multiple projects with allocation distributed 20%,50%,30% etc. This does not work in reality. There is a switching time between two tasks and people take around 15 mins to achieve FLOW (high productive zone)

Agile Testing: An Approach to Achieve Quality Sooner

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

Often I hear from testing folks one question. How can I apply Agile for testing? Local optimisation has been the bane of software development – viewing it from his/her activity perspective and not just as a whole. Let’s see how agile principles can be seen through testing angle?

Image Source: www.testobsessed.com

Agile is Not Ad hoc

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

Recently, I was asked to attend a leadership meeting in a company. They had representations from different business units and groups. When we hit the topic of agility within the organisation, one of the directors immediately jumped into the conversation and said his projects are very agile in nature. That made me curious and I asked him what do you mean by that. He said,

My team take change requests everyday, we don’t do any documentation, we re-plan almost everyday to tune to new requirements from the clients and on…..

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