Collaboration

Planning Poker is NOT about Agile Estimation!

One of the popular mechanisms to estimate story points as a team is planning poker exercise.

It’s an awesome technique but it may become a challenge for some teams. For instance, a team estimates story points separately as developers and testers. Later, they add up those points to arrive at resultant estimates.

Some teams get into endless discussions to ascertain if the estimate should have been 2 or 3, 5 or 8 or maybe 7.

It looks like, the primary goal of planning poker exercise is to arrive at the correct estimate.

But that’s not the point!

#NoStandup – Remote Team Collaboration Patterns

by ShriKant Vashishtha 2 Comments

What happens when each team-member of your team works from a remote location (possibly from a different time-zone and country).

How do you sync-up in such a team?

The Secret Mantra for Agile Success

by ShriKant Vashishtha 3 Comments

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?

Metrics to Build Great Agile Teams: Measure Influence, Not Control

by Avienaash Shiralige 17 Comments

Couple of weeks back, I noticed an incident that triggered this post. Senior Management in a company applauded people for showing individual heroics on the project.

Some of them were:

Staying late in office to address a client request?
Responding to project emails at late night..
Rewarding testers on number of bugs found and more.

And then, managers shared this privately with rest of the organisation too. Treating this as accepted, rewarding behaviour invited more such incidents and frustrated many of those who don’t do this. Below comic strip summarises it well.

“You Will Get What You Measure(or Reward)!”

I recently heard an another incident of how testing team kept an very important bug under the carpet before bringing it up just a week before release, and then getting rewards for the same. Such behaviours more likely are the candidates for root cause analysis than rewards.

Agile Team Dysfunction: Overcoming the “We vs. They” Mentality

by ShriKant Vashishtha 5 Comments

Yesterday I had a conversation with one of my colleagues Prakash who works as a tester in a Scrum team.

“So how is it going on?”, I asked.

Prakash took a deep breath and said, “Umm…workwise I think I am getting more confident on the application functionality now. However in one of our retrospectives I realized that I have to improve on some of my personal traits.”

“Interesting ! – and what are those?”, I asked.