This is a guest post by Prasad Chaudhari, freelance java consultant. He was appointed as a project manager for the project mentioned below and played a role of ScrumMaster.
The first prerequisite to going agile offshore is a mature and realistic understanding of agile at home. We’ve been practicing scrum on-site for several years including trained Product Owners (POs) and ScrumMasters, both of whom employ and leverage scrum artifacts.
Locally, we have six scrum teams: five software development teams, and one IT operations team. Each team has a sprint backlog, scrum board and burn-down chart. Automated tests and continuous integration are part of the daily business.
Our company has a universal understanding and acceptance of the Lean and Agile Value Chain, beginning with rough user concepts and ending with customer delivery. Without this basic building block, as the theory of constraints suggests, there will either be many unfinished stories in progress (i.e., because operations cannot make regular releases), or developers will starve for stories (because the business is unable to prioritize).
Last year, we decided to grow our software development capability by adding another scrum team in India. After a few iterations, reflections and process adaptations, the remote team became productive. We’ve been successfully running agile offshore for over a year now, and I’d like to share our key learnings.
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by Matthias Marschall on December 8, 2011 · 2 comments
The DevOps hype produces some strange effects. Not only do tool vendors try to jump on the DevOps band wagon by declaring their products “DevOps inside” or listing DevOps as a feature, but companies start to look for a “DevOp” in their job ads. Don’t be misled! Here’s what DevOps is really about:
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by Matthias Marschall on November 24, 2011 · 0 comments
Instead of escalating wars between departments by driving them to ever more ambitious, local goals, we need to break down the wall between development and operations. Defining overarching goals which resonate for both departments creates an environment where DevOps collaboration may thrive.
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by Dan Ackerson on November 17, 2011 · 1 comment
Agile developers know how to
estimate story points for customer features. And while transferring this knowledge over to the project team can take a few sprints, it is speedily adopted and velocity becomes a focal point of the sprint planning games. But, if the all the project participants aren’t officially on the team, a growing gap will appear between where the team wants the project to go and where the other participants thinks it should go. Story points quickly become a source of frustration and conflict instead of helping to gel the project team.
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by Matthias Marschall on October 13, 2011 · 1 comment
It’s amazing. Talking to a bunch of fellow CTOs I heard a lot of them saying: “We introduced Scrum and it works really well” and “we’re too slow to bring new features to our customers”. This piqued my curiosity. Scrum is supposed to speed up feature delivery through short iterations. How can an organization claim to run Scrum successfully but not deliver customer value fast?
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by Matthias Marschall on September 22, 2011 · 11 comments
You’ve most probably been there: To win that one ueber-important client, your friendly sales rep sells the farm and his grandmother (well actually he sells features, which he invents right in front of the client to make sure to get the deal, but the effect is nearly the same). And not only does he sell „the grand new feature in the sky“, but he even guarantees a delivery date – and all without speaking a word to the tech guys. Sweet, huh? He is a hero. He made that huge deal and everyone is patting his shoulder. Well, besides you probably. And everyone else who now has to deliver a completely bloated feature in a totally unrealistic time frame. And, of course, there’s absolutely no room for negotiations. In fact, you’re not even allowed to talk to the client to ask a question about his requirements because the sales guy doesn’t want to make a „bad impression“.
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by Matthias Marschall on September 8, 2011 · 2 comments
Sad but true – it’s pretty rare for managers to hire the right people.
If there are too many candidates, effective filtering is critical. Too few candidates, and it’s hard to get applications at all, much less the right ones. I want to describe the top five errors you make when trying to hire the best people.
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Imagine an ant working at the top of a mountain. Next to it, there’s a sluice of melt water running and, at that moment, the ant removes a tiny particle from the rock face. A few hundred molecules of water quickly seize upon the shortcut, and gravity takes care of the rest. The individual rivulets on the mountain’s face eventually run together in a small brook, jostling pebbles and twigs along its bubbly trough. Running ever downwards, doubling in speed and force, the stream now catches up rocks, branches and other streams join the flow. Almost effortlessly, a mighty river is born carving its way through the massive granite over millennia. The imprint upon the surrounding landscape is a culmination of billions of tiny actions – wind, rain fall, freezes and even one tiny ant.
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by Matthias Marschall on August 25, 2011 · 1 comment
Maybe you read it long ago, or it’s been on your “to read” list for years. Or maybe you’ve never heard of it: The book “Good to Great” by James C. Collins. It describes how companies move from being average to great and how they can fail to make the transition. So, what does all this have to do with agile?
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by Dan Ackerson on August 18, 2011 · 1 comment
In Scrum, sprints are time-boxed delivery cycles that help keep the team focused on the goal. If you don’t know which goal I’m referring to, check out
Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s novel “The Goal” (hint: I think it’s something about making money).
For web development, I run weekly sprints and this surprises a lot of people – “How can you get anything done in just one week?” Truth be told, if I could, I’d run shorten this to daily cycles, but then I think it wouldn’t be Scrum anymore (Kanban, anyone?).
You’d be amazed what you can accomplish in a week – even if it’s only to convince your team that you should try your damnedest to ship one meaningful feature every 5 days. I want to challenge the idea that longer sprints help you get more done.
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