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 [...]
Kanban & Agile
“What is agile?” or “What is kanban?” are questions a lot of people are asking. They wonder whether applying extreme programming techniques or managing user requirements with User Stories is of any value. This area shows you why agile practices are worthwhile software development methods. How can you improve your requirement gathering? What is agile testing? And how do we measure success using agile web development? Read through the articles in this section and find out for yourself!
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Sitting in unnecessary meetings sucks. You know what I’m talking about: A lot of people crammed into one room, half of whom have no business with the discussion. The other half are responsible for the topic, but didn’t bother preparing for the discussion. So why are all these people sitting together? Let’s examine this from [...]
Today was a great day. I helped import our entire “roadmap” of functional requirements from an Excel spreadsheet into Pivotal Tracker. Even though we allocated almost a half-day to accomplish this, it was done in less than two hours (including in-depth descriptions and backgrounds on many features I hadn’t yet seen). The product manager’s eyes [...]
One of the most challenging things about introducing Agile in the workplace is that it’s not very widespread. People have heard mixed reviews about it’s implementations, and are hesitant to exchange the known (no matter how bad it may be), for the unknown. More and more companies, however, are adopting Scrum for their project management. [...]
Scrum defines a set of required meetings: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Scrum Review, and Scrum Retrospective. Additionally, there might be a Scrum of Scrums, if you’re running multiple Scrum teams in parallel. If you’re doing two week sprints you spend at least half-a-day per week in Scrum meetings. Isn’t that a lot of additional overhead?
