Agile Culture

Importance of Project Management Skills for Scrum Master Role?

Product development continues to remain the primary focus of Agile software development methods.

While we focus on product development and in turn on product development companies, a big segment of software development eco-system, IT service companies, isn’t talked about that much.

People working in IT service companies can vouch for the struggle they deal with on daily basis. But their stories don’t get enough attention.

When it comes to software implementations, IT services companies work for a client organisation and that client organisation may have its own set of processes which may or may not align with the Agile culture.

So each engagement they work with, they may have to deal with different kind of work culture and probably different processes as well.

IT services companies actually work in a very volatile world and deal with lots of uncertainties, dependencies and risks on which they seem to have no control.

Who all should Participate in Story Point Sizing Activity?

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

There are folks who may be moving from waterfall to agile approach.

They in general divide the estimates in terms of development estimates and testing estimates. These estimates are separately done by the representatives of developers and testers. These representatives are either not part of the team or may not be doing that work.

In Agile teams, the story point sizing activity is done by the whole development team.

Just to reiterate again, all cross-functional team-members participate in the sizing activity. Also, there are no separate story points for development and testing activities which could potentially enable the team members to estimate them separately and combine them together to come up with the resultant size of a story.

What Exactly do We Want to Achieve Through Agile? – A Google Maps Example

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

‘agile’ is an ordinary word in English. It means “able to move quickly and easily” (online dictionary), with an emphasis on changing direction.

So essentially ‘agile’ is the ability to create and respond to change in order to succeed in an uncertain and turbulent environment.

Recently I observed that real world traffic and Google Maps can help a lot in explaining the concept of agility. This post is all about joining the dots.

Driving in a real world traffic is not straightforward. Time taken to cover a distance depends on traffic jams, weather conditions and other unknowns.

When someone asks how much time it will take to cover a specific distance in Delhi traffic for instance, only true answer is a range of time, say anything between 30 minutes to 1-1/2 hours.

Moving back to software world, when someone asks a similar question, e.g. provide an estimate for a complex software project, there can’t be a single estimate but will be a range of estimates, i.e. anything between ideal scenario and the worst case scenario.

Passion Driven Work – Secret Sauce of Generating Exponential Value in a Company

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

This is a story of a small IT service company in India with a capacity of 80-100 people. The key USP of the company was its focus on flat hierarchy, extreme programming culture, getting great people onboard, technology innovation, thought-leadership and encourage people to become authority in their respective field.

Flat hierarchy for the simple reason — it could be one of the biggest blocker for empowerment, innovation and decision-making in a startup. So it was quite common to see a senior developer pair programming with a newbie.

By having flat roles you can build a self-organized and autonomous team, which then could take its own decisions.

Here are some of the snapshots of what we were looking for.

What Stops Scrum Teams from Self Organizing?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

One of the key indicators to know whether Scrum is working in a team comes from the fact if the team is self-organizing or not.
Before getting into the reasons on what stops teams to self-organize, let’s see the life without self-organization.