case-study

From Branch Merge Hell to Trunk-based Development – A Bank Agile Case Study 2/n

Lots of organizations are desperately trying to bring agility in their enterprise IT. In many such cases, enterprise IT stands on the worn pillars of traditional Waterfall process and legacy products.

The business in such orgs sees IT as a black hole where no business need can escape from inside it. The reason being, traditional process, and legacy systems take months of cycle time to deliver almost any business need.

This results in frustrated and desperate stakeholders who threaten to try anything or everything under the sun to get tangible outcomes.

This case-study is a story of a bank which was almost on the verge of outsourcing its entire IT. The bank since has moved on to become one of the pioneers in banking innovation space. The bank focuses to serve its customers with innovation and agility in its offerings.

In the first part of the case-study, we looked at the difficult conditions the team lived in. That was more to do with technical processes they used for handling multiple projects at the same time. This part focuses on how they moved on from the branch merge hell they lived in.

The Branch Merge Hell Team Lived With – A Bank Agile Case Study 1/n

by ShriKant Vashishtha 4 Comments

Lots of organizations are desperately trying to bring agility in their enterprise IT. In such cases, enterprise IT stands on the worn pillars of traditional Waterfall process and legacy products.

This results in a frustrated and desperate stakeholders who threaten to try anything or everything under the sun to get tangible outcomes.

This case-study is a story of a bank which was almost on the verge of outsourcing its entire IT. The bank since has moved on to become one of the pioneers in banking innovation space. It focuses to serve its customers every day with innovation and agility in a faster paced competitive ecosystem.
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Overcoming Cultural Differences in Distributed Agile Teams – A Case Study

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

Recently I had a discussion with one of my dutch friends who has a company based in India. He mentioned that sometimes it gets very difficult to understand and handle cultural issues with his Indian colleagues. Issues which he mentioned are not new and people from western countries interacting Indian teams must be very well aware of what I’ll mention here. Some examples:

One person speaking on behalf of the entire team and other people either keep silent or just reply in terms of yes and no
Always saying yes to everything even though even customer may already be aware that the task may be difficult to achieve.

As you investigate further, these instances are very common in the team coming from hierarchy centric cultures where only senior and so-called senior people have a say, while the rest just follow what’s asked them to do.
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Waterfall to Agile : Experiences from Trenches

by ShriKant Vashishtha 2 Comments

Image credit – https://vitalitychicago.com via https://i1.wp.com/vitalitychicago.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/how-to-successfully-transition-from-waterfall-to-scum_methodology.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1

There have been a lot of agile success stories but mostly are around project challenges and how teams overcame them. In those high level details, the experiences from the trenches get hidden or get overlooked.

There are still many projects and people, who are transitioning from waterfall to Agile. It’s interesting for such people to hear the experiences from similar people (who moved waterfall to Agile) around their role, i.e. how for a developer role things got changed and similarly for tester/BA/Scrum Master roles as well.

This post is based on the real interviews of team members of such a project in a large enterprise. The team members shared their perspectives around their role. For everyone in the team, this was their first ever Agile project.

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?