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 … Continue reading Optimizing Offshore Software Development with Agile
Category: Kanban & Agile
Cross-dysfunctional Teams and the Story Point Fight
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 … Continue reading Cross-dysfunctional Teams and the Story Point Fight
Where Agile Falls Short
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 … Continue reading Where Agile Falls Short
How Non-negotiable Features Kill Software Products
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 … Continue reading How Non-negotiable Features Kill Software Products
How “Good to Great” applies to agile software development
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 … Continue reading How “Good to Great” applies to agile software development
Getting Lean with Weekly Sprints
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 … Continue reading Getting Lean with Weekly Sprints
Meetings or Trust – Choose Your Weapons
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 … Continue reading Meetings or Trust – Choose Your Weapons
Why Excel Spreadsheets Hurt Project Management
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 … Continue reading Why Excel Spreadsheets Hurt Project Management
Ground Zero: Starting Agile Development from Scratch
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. … Continue reading Ground Zero: Starting Agile Development from Scratch
Scrum Meetings – Relief or Burden?
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? … Continue reading Scrum Meetings – Relief or Burden?
Agile Web Operations 