Demystifying Agile, Getting to its Core
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?
We all know biggest risk in the product development is building a WRONG product. There are numerous examples from history to see why some products did not see light of the day or big success.
Recently, I came across a product team which took MVP approach and built a product which saw very good initial success. But with time product was unable to keep the users engaged and convert initial success to revenue to keep it floating.
Some of the questions the team started to deliberate were:
[Read more…] about Lean Product Development: Dealing with Business Emergency
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.
[Read more…] about Enterprise Agile Transformation – Are You Able to See Big Elephant?
As long as customer isn’t interested in throughput or customer trusts the team, whatever way you size or estimate doesn’t really matter. But that doesn’t happen very often. Whenever customer questions about team throughput, it becomes challenging to answer using hour-based estimation as time taken to complete any particular task deflates over time.
Some teams follow capacity based estimation technique where they identify the number of hours available in a team for the entire sprint duration. Based on that they pick up stories in a sprint. Again here as well, there is absolutely no way to know any change in team throughput as size for which capacity is defined isn’t defined.
[Read more…] about FAQ: Why Story points? Why not map story points with time? What’s the issue?
Repeated software-development tasks are becoming automated through the application of Continuous Delivery and DevOps. If developers are taking more and more testing responsibilities into their hands, I wonder what will be the role of traditional (manual **only**) testing and testers moving forward?
