Practicing agile theory

- A Key Ingredient for Agile Success Introduction: In the fast-paced world of software development and project management, staying on top of tasks, priorities, and progress is essential. The Daily Scrum, often referred to as the Daily Standup, is a cornerstone of the Agile methodology. It's a brief, focused meeting that empowers teams to synchronize, collaborate, and make data-driven decisions. In this blog post, we'll dive into the what, why, and how of the Daily Scrum to help you harness its potential for your agile projects. What is the Daily Scrum/Daily Stand-up? The Daily Scrum is a daily ritual (a scrum event) that brings the entire team together for a brief, time-boxed catch up. Its primary objectives are: Synchronization: Ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding the sprint goal and knows what to work upon given the priority. Collaboration: Encourage open communication among team members. Identify and Remove Obstacles: Highlight any impediments that need res...

 -  Back to basics It has been more than 2 decades since the agile manifesto was incubated and eventually published. For those who understood the agile values & principles well, 'agile' has been more than a  word in the English dictionary - they have been living agile or being agile . The others, have 'generally' been doing agile with full cognizance & often, labelling it not good for managing project lifecycles - often calling it a misfit . No offence, but this population believes that "agile  is a gas pedal "  & just doing agile will help deliver outcomes faster & sooner . Talking of outcomes, quite often it is perceived that "no matter what project management methodology or technology you use, in the end - all that matters is the outcome!" Is it? Really?!? What about the journey or team hardship, change in plans (etc.) enroute to the destination or simply put  the outcomes ? This ability to change course/action plans is what I'...

Here I discuss the curious case of mixing story points and person days and using them synonymously, not understanding what a monumental difference it is, in terms of arriving at a schedule using the two. While the team is using T-Shirt sizing (or planning poker) to come up with a backlog size in Story Points, they are using the words "Story Points" and "Person Days" interchangeably. As a prologue to my previous post https://practicing-agile.blogspot.com/2019/08/when-you-equate-story-points-with-time.html - the objective in this one is to find the answer to the question -  "How does a backlog estimate in terms of Story Points translate to how long will it take for the team to deliver the backlog, given that requirements, technology and a lot of various other factors influencing estimates are bound to change?" In other words, if the backlog size is 120 Story Points, its equivalent to saying that the backlog is worth 120 PDs of work! A derivatio...

Agile becomes fragile! When you are "doing" agile (most likely because it's in vogue) but have not come out of the "sequential " SDLC execution syndrome or the traditional waterfall way of thinking and executing a project, you are most likely headed for a disaster! Of many things that may or will go wrong, is the estimation of work . The traditional methods of estimation like function-point analysis helped us answer the question - "how long (or duration) will a piece of work take to complete?". On the contrary, Agile keeps it simple and takes a minimalistic approach to estimation. In my opinion, estimation in agile is no rocket science as long as you are clear with the basics and understand "what story points are" and how to use them. Visit my blog post on story points for an understanding. Story Points vs. Time (Person Days) Mike Cohn shares a mantra that makes estimation easy - " Estimate size, measure velocity, derive ...

An analogy - Ever thought of how Agile scrum could very closely be compared with a "road trip" that almost everyone must've taken sometime in their lifetime? In arriving at the destination ( Product ), there's a lot that goes into the journey -  the Scrum Team must have visibility ( Vision, Roadmap ) to start with, along with an awareness of the road conditions ( Project Transparency ).  That said, the team must have an understanding of traffic/driving rules ( Scrum Processes ) and the vehicle chosen for the trip, should be in a good working condition ( Dev Environment ). With those as prerequisites to begin - The driver must have the knowledge of the route/directions to get to the destination ( Knowledge/Expertise/Competence of developers ). In addition, the driver must have enough fuel ( Motivation ) to get the journey started & keep it going until the team has arrived at the destination ( Product ). While the above sounds simple, during the j...