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Agile Software Development

Can’t negotiate size… and a good thing too

In many companies the Business Analyst or the Project Manager “estimate” the project and bind developers on the project to that estimate. This is an absolutely brutal thing to do to your project. But even within agile teams where the developers estimate, the Business Analysts or Project Managers sometimes tend to challenge and negotiate developer estimates. Not because they don’t trust the developers but merely out of selfishness. Because it gives a tremendous kick to deliver something that a client wants faster. Now if the team is “estimating” in a “time based” unit such negotiations make some sense. Because a… Read More »Can’t negotiate size… and a good thing too

What are we doing?? – Part Three

This is what got me thinking about “What (the %*&$) are we really doing?”. Are gazillions of dollars being invested in IT, by organizations just trying to maintain their status quo? As the study shows, this is partly true. Businesses require to grow for survival. Growth requires accommodating more and more people and systems into your business. It is very natural (and useful) to be paranoid of these new people / systems. As businesses grow they have to become more or less bureaucratic. Bureaucracy requires additional processing power. This power can either be man OR machine If the business chooses… Read More »What are we doing?? – Part Three

What are we doing?? – Part Two

Any system is inherently trust based but always tends towards being distrustful. Consider a prisoners’ dilemma example. (A) = A crook with a bag of jewels(B) = Another with $100 (A) needs the money and (B) needs the jewels. Now they are both “if you see my face, I’ll have to kill you” kind of guys. So they develop a simple system. (A) leaves the money a designated place in the forest and (B) leaves the bag of jewels at another designated place. If they both co-operate, they leave happy. But life is not so simple, is it? Once they… Read More »What are we doing?? – Part Two

What are we doing?? – Part One

I am doing what we call an Inception for a new project. The situation is not at all unusual. The Constraints An Organization with a bunch of generic e-commerce platforms Live customer sites on each of these platforms One of these platforms particularly painful Integration with proprietary back-office operations software The RequirementsBuild a custom platform that will replace all the existing ones, support all the customer sites and have a bunch of unique features. And BTW we need to go live in 2 months.How?The only way to do this is build a bare bones application that can take a couple… Read More »What are we doing?? – Part One

End of a good project

For the past 8 months I have been working on omio. We got it from being just a mobile deals aggregator (for the UK) to also being a social network around mobile phones with reviews, ratings and stuff. Ruby on Rails was fun too… but then, that’s always true, isn’t it. Today was the last day of the project. I have to say it’s been a blast all throughout. First in Chennai with a new office and an extremely smart and totally insane team. Then in Pune with Sid, Aman, Deep and Anand… lot of fun. Sid is rolling onto… Read More »End of a good project

Business Analysis and Quantum Physics

I recently read In search of Shrödinger’s cat. It’s a wonderful introduction to quantum mechanics; The basic (and intriguing) problem of the elusive electron acting as a wave and a particle at the same time. Analysis is very much like observing the electron in the classic two slit experiment. The business domain is like a wave traveling through the two slits. But the moment we analyze, we make it boil down to one reality by asking it How, What, When and Who. Waves give you a probability distribution, while particles give you one of the possibilities as a reality. Looking… Read More »Business Analysis and Quantum Physics

Smart Business Analysis

A bunch of business analysts have started this blog recently. I hope to contribute to it more regularly than I update this blog. I will keep cross-posting here and linking good articles. I hope to save smart business analysis from some of my more weird philosophies and analogies in the future. I thought I’ll pick up a good practical BA problem for the first post there but ended up writing about “Business Analysis and Quantum Physics” for some reason.

Size or Estimate

Estimation, I think, has been one of the biggest problems of mankind. The Software development industry is no exception to this sad reality. We almost never seem to get it right. The problem with the word “estimate” is that it’s personal. It’s relative to the person who is estimating. Moreover, it’s a unit of time. That is why I prefer “sizing” stories rather than estimating them. Size is a non disputed (standard) unit, which measures the level of complexity involved in developing a piece of functionality, a story. The size is standard across a particular project team. Pizzas are a… Read More »Size or Estimate

Functional Goals

After this post, I have had a number of conversations with people about what I really meant by setting functional targets instead of story point (velocity) targets. In one such discussion, I was given an example where someone set a goal to run for 90 minutes!! At first glance you might not find the last statement worth the exclamation marks at the end of it. But this is exactly the difference between functional targets and velocity targets. I think it’s wrong to set a target of running for 90 minutes. The real goal is to burn X number of calories.… Read More »Functional Goals

Iterationless…

After working in week-long iterations for 2 and a half years, going iterationless left me a little confused on my recent project. Of course when I say iterationless, I mean using extremely small iterations to bring in a flow to stories. Lean? Distributed Lean, maybe? Firstly, I like the idea of trying something new. The team being small and the project being developed in ruby helps this experiment a lot. There are, however, somethings missing in this way of working. I’ll list them down and give my view on each of them in this post. To realize what we missed,… Read More »Iterationless…