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agile

Technology Team Models for Modern Businesses

Siloes For as long as I remember, most of the “progressive” IT world has been talking about “removing siloes” as the way to improve the results of all IT endeavors. The debate is largely about what counts as “good results” and this definition has gradually shifted from a focus on efficiency and optimisation to a focus on value and effectiveness which is a welcome change. In terms of siloes, however, it only means moving from siloes of technology / expertise to siloes of functional value. There is no way to remove all siloes. In fact, we will not be able… Read More »Technology Team Models for Modern Businesses

Custard Apples

I love Custard Apples. Not giving anyone any ideas but I’m pretty sure you could kidnap me by showing me a custard apple at the right moment! Needless to say I want to grow a custard apple tree… Now growing a custard apple tree is a very difficult business. You have to: Put the seeds in water and discard the ones that float Leave the rest in water for about a week Wrap them in a damp tissue paper and leave them for a few more weeks to germinate. Some of them will germinate. Some will catch fungus. Others will… Read More »Custard Apples

The Gardening Metaphor

During the lockdown over the last 4 months, I’ve taken up gardening. When I first started reading about agile software development, a lot of analogies for software development came from the world of construction. I guess it was a simple comparison that started due to the engineering nature of software development, but to this day we keep saying we are “building” software. There are several other analogies that people have used over the years like building a car (the famous skateboard => bicycle => car diagram) or the one with the “Monalisa” picture. I guess these analogies are sufficient in… Read More »The Gardening Metaphor

Iterations, Batches and Flow

I’ve recently had a lot of conversations with people who are thinking of iterations as batches. By definition that’s what they are. You sign up for a “batch” of stories, at the beginning of the iteration, and you deliver them by the end of that iteration. However, it is useful to think of requirements (stories) as units of work that flow through the value stream. Here is why I think so. What is a batch? “A batch is a group of items that will be processed at once as a single unit”. Items are usually batched to achieve “economies of scale”. This usually means… Read More »Iterations, Batches and Flow

Number Lust

I am an amateur photographer while I am not not hacking project teams and building custom software at ThoughtWorks. Photographers are known to have bouts of lens lust* time and again, especially at the beginning. I realize that some managers seem to have similar urges when it comes to numbers, metrics. They suffer from acute number lust. In ThoughtWorks, we believe in and encourage self organizing teams. BAs gather requirements, developers write code, QAs test and automate and the customer signs stories off in a flow. The Project Manager role is therefore reduced to making sure that nothing obstructs this… Read More »Number Lust

Onsite Business Analyst

This has come up in various discussions recently and I want to put down my thoughts about the role and responsibilities. For a ThoughtWorks team in India (or China) most of the work is offshore agile development. Clients are usually in the UK or the USA. The team is structured as follows: Offshore PM Offshore Devs Offshore QA(s) Offshore BA(s) Onsite BA(s) This is how the communication works. Of course there are other exchanges that take place but the Business Q & A and the Technical Q & A are the most important pieces of concrete information exchanged. Other companies,… Read More »Onsite Business Analyst

Metrics

I have recently come out of a consulting assignment which has given me loads of time to read and think about processes, improvements and effectiveness. (People who follow me on google reader must have noticed). It also had me thinking about introduction of agile into a traditional IT outfit and what would make it more effective. Top -> Down The Top -> Down approach is where someone in the top management realizes (or is convinced) that agile is the solution to all their problems and goes on to “mandate” agile. This is not necessarily bad. If the organization hires the… Read More »Metrics

Testing considered wasteful??

@silvercatalyst posted on twitter a few days back that one of the trainees in his session counted testing as waste. I retweeted with a #funny but @silvercatalyst said he actually agreed with it. So we twiscussed it for a while. (By the way twitter is just the wrong tool for discussing interesting things). Back to the story. Here’s what we ended with after a few emails had been exchanged: Testing is not wasteful. But testing as an activity after development (especially after a time gap) is wasteful Some types of testing can be done upfront but other types still have… Read More »Testing considered wasteful??

Back to the Basics – 1 – The problem

Reading Martin’s ConversationalStories renewed my confidence in this draft post from about an year ago. I just couldn’t put it in the right words and gave up on it. I keep talking about deterministic universes over randomness and stuff like that but the gist of the matter is simple. Writing stories is not the JOB of a Business Analyst in agile development. Writing stories is a collaborative effort in which Customer, BA, Dev, QA should all take part. This is the N in the INVEST principle. And here’s the post ============== I have been talking about tracking and trends and… Read More »Back to the Basics – 1 – The problem

Cumulative Flow Diagrams

Once you have your wall in place, it’s time to start monitoring your progress through the project. Best done on a daily basis and best done with a “Finger Chart”. Here’s an example. A finger chart is basically your wall turned sideways so that your swim lanes are horizontal rather than vertical. Now what you track is the number of stories in each state (finger). This chart may not make sense to you immediately but there’s a lot of useful data hidden in here. Here are the different inferences you can make by looking at a finger chart. 1) BottlenecksThe… Read More »Cumulative Flow Diagrams