Demystifying Agile, Getting to its Core
This year I delivered a presentation on “Distributed Agile Patterns” in Agile India conference held in Bangalore based on different patterns evolved or discovered during my Agile journey.
The video is available now. You may want to have a look and provide your feedback.
Every Agile team has to deal with different emergencies next to their regular work. Every team dream of achieving sustainable pace comes with nightmares of production emergencies/defects, support and maintenance tasks within a sprint which takes focus completely off the sprint goals. The goal of this webinar is to see different approaches team can take to absorb a reasonable amount of uncertainty, striking balance between robustness and speed within the sprint.
Also we will discuss about how to deal with “Pivot” in lean product development. In this state, product has to go through a course correction in terms of vision, market segment and features. This is almost an emergency on business side. In webinar, we will see how engineering teams need to do course correction in their approach too.
Audience will learn:
If this sounds interesting to you, please register for the webinar here. Do share with others too!
Webinar Timings: Wed, May 13, 2015 9:30 PM – 10:30 PM IST
One of the basic but important customer expectations is – the software product should be of very good quality. That makes sense as well. However, what exactly “good quality” means?
Here are characteristics of good quality software:
We know “Testing As An Activity” is important, and why we should all test. The old axiom that “Testers Test and Programmers Code” is so outdated now and everyone needs to change. Testers are the testing experts in a team, and can help enable the whole team to own quality but they are certainly not the only one’s who should be testing. Like, developers need to contribute towards testing by unit testing their code and also pair testing to minimize defects and minimize test – defect-fix cycle.
Testing in agile, addresses the processes that produce software and also products of those processes. Hence I ask my teams to not just focus on validating software after development, but also check processes that produce software like, quality of stories, requirement/impact analysis, acceptance criteria(using behavior-driven-development to address “3 amigos problem), and more.
Take a look at our agile testing workshop which is a detailed 2 day course which focusses on test automation strategies, lean approach to defect prevention, various tools and techniques to automate, BDD(behavior-driven-development) and how to use various frameworks – Linear Scripting, Test Library Architecture, Data-Driven Testing, Keyword/Table-Driven and Hybrid automation frameworks.
In our last post, we discussed about how to break performance measures into team and individual measures to bring more team behavior orientations into appraisals.
Today, let’s talk about addressing other two issues: feedback frequency and how to make feedback effective.
Agile thinking is based on building frequent feedback loops within your teams and organization. Few examples of frequent feedback loops are: