Culture

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

‘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.

Moving Beyond Developer, Tester Roles – The Era of a Learning Person

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

More teams I work with, I face almost similar kind of challenge wherein team members want to remain confined to their roles. They continue to work solo. No pair programming, swarming or mobbing.

Why?

Because their skill sets don’t match. One such team have two iOS developers, 2 pythons developers and one tester. They can divide the PBIs into subtasks but they’ll continue to work solo as their skills don’t match.

It seemed like a valid point to me at first.

But then I thought a little deeper. Why exactly do we have developer or tester role to begin with? Aren’t they actually skills?

Considering myself a developer, do I need to be a developer only throughout my life? Can’t I test as well? Of course I can.

Similarly if I am a Python or a backend developer, nobody really constrain me to remain a backend developer throughout my life.

But then these roles seem to be embedded in our mindset. Ever thought why?
[Read more…] about Moving Beyond Developer, Tester Roles – The Era of a Learning Person

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

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

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.
[Read more…] about The Branch Merge Hell Team Lived With – A Bank Agile Case Study 1/n