Subscribe to the blogPosted on August 21st, 2009 in Agile by siddharta || No Comment
Here are the slides for my 1 hour talk at the NASSCOM Emerge forum held at the Accord Metropolitan this morning. The topic was “Agile for CEOs – An approach to happy customers and healthy bottom lines” and was an introduction to agile methodologies.
Continue reading ‘Agile For CEOs – An Approach To Happy Customers And Healthy Bottom Lines’ »
Posted on August 18th, 2009 in Agile by siddharta || No Comment
By far the toughest problem facing organizations that want to adopt agile methods of software development is to be able to adopt the values and principles that underlie agile methodologies. This is because agile principles often run counter to the established organizational culture in most companies. Changing this culture is hard, and it takes a lot more than just data to achieve this change.
If the data indicates that one method is better than another, common sense would tell you to adopt the better method. However, because change is so difficult, this is a very difficult thing to do.
I came across the story of Semmelweis recently. Here is how it goes:
Continue reading ‘Change is Hard: The Story of Ignaz Semmelweis’ »
Posted on August 14th, 2009 in Agile, Silver Catalyst by siddharta || No Comment
Selina interviewed me for the Producteering Forum recently. The transcripts for the first two parts have been put online.
Part 1
There is a tendency among some of the folks who practice agile to interpret the “Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools” in the Agile Manifesto to mean that Agile software development does not require any defined set of processes. So what is your take on that?
… What agile says is when you have different projects running, they all run in different conditions. You might have one project which is composed of a lot of senior people, you might have another project with a lot of junior people and a couple of senior people. [We] can’t have the same process for both the teams because the team structure is different, so some practices that work for the senior teams will not work for the mixed team. So while they will follow some practices, they might follow different set of practices. That’s a process, but then it’s not a centralized defined process done by someone sitting in an ivory tower who then enforces it among all the projects in the company…that’s something which people are genuinely against. Have a process – but have a process which is suitable for your condition.
Read the whole of Part 1 here.
Part 2
Agile has its own advantages and people who vouch for it. So does a completely different way of doing things – the CMM (Capability Maturity Model). What are the compelling reasons for a person who is practicing CMM processes to move to agile?
I’d say there’s only one compelling reason – and that is, if what you are doing currently is not working for you. If you’re following CMMI and it is working for you, that’s great, then there is really no need to change. You don’t have to change because it’s the in-thing. That’s something which I’m quite against.
But a lot of people do have problems when it comes to CMMI when requirements are unstable, because of the way it is structured, and with testing and user acceptance right at the end, which creates a lot of issues with respect to changing requirements. Or cases where you’ve not got the requirements exactly or there’s also the case where the customer sees a product and then gets lots of ideas on how it can be done. So when you have a market like this, then you find that CMMI tends to cause issues because you get bugs right in the end, you get change requests right in the end. It can be difficult to cope with it.
Posted on August 10th, 2009 in Silver Catalyst by siddharta || No Comment
We’ve just added a task estimate trend graph. This graph shows the estimates for a particular task. Using this graph, you can see the initial estimate and all the intermediate estimates, with the current estimate last. To access this graph, click the “Task Information” icon on the task card.
Posted on August 4th, 2009 in Agile, Kanban by siddharta || 2 Comments
One of the problem of Scrum is that it leads you to believe that there is no workflow at all. Stories are started, they go “in progress” and then they are done. Unfortunately this leads to a myopic development oriented view of the project.