Agile Transformation: 8 Mindset-Shifts You Make In Your Agile Adoption Journey

by Avienaash Shiralige July 21, 2012

1. Senior Management Agile is a silver bullet that will fix all issues is a myth. But Senior Management perceive this as fact. Agile and its frameworks have a great knack of bringing forward hidden organization issues like tendency to command and control, developers/testers taking short cut to quality, less focus & preparedness to test [...]

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Agile Transformation:10 Potholes to Avoid When You Drive an Agile Car

by Avienaash Shiralige July 3, 2012

Transforming your organization towards agile is like moving your organization to a new country with new culture and language with clear differences from how you work today.  No amount of training will help you in dealing with different situations. I am compiling some common challenges & scenarios organization sees when they are new to agile. [...]

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Agile Estimation: 9 Reasons Why You Should Use Story Points

by Avienaash Shiralige June 25, 2012

A common question about estimating with points is, “Why Points?  Why not in Days? Finally I need to do planning so I need to convert points to Days. Why this additional level of indirection? In-fact I find story points as a good distraction to the team. Let me go over why having this “additional layer [...]

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Agile Estimation:8 Steps to Successful Story Point Estimation

by Avienaash Shiralige June 19, 2012

In Story sizing, team does a comparative analysis between all of the stories for the project. Let’s look at the typical story sizing steps. For each story to be sized, do the following as a team(Product Owner, Core Scrum team including developers, testers & scrum master).

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Kano Analysis:Time to Market is a Differentiator Anymore?

by Avienaash Shiralige June 5, 2012

Service companies offerings and messages often says “Faster Time to Market” or “Reduce your Cost of Development“…. Do you think it is a game changer NOW? I would agree if it was couple of years back. But is it still? Applying Kano analysis here could reveal few thoughts. For those not familiar with the Kano Analysis, [...]

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User Stories: Lack of Big Picture Leads to Blind Man Product

by Avienaash Shiralige May 31, 2012

One of the Scrum values is “Focus”. It can make or mar a product. It brings direction to the development of a product – from start to finish; and is the back-bone of an effective business strategy. Having said that, overdo it and the tables are turned. Fret too much over ‘focus’ and what could [...]

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Scrum Team Dependency on User Experience/Wireframes

by Avienaash Shiralige May 28, 2012

Dependency management is a key aspect in Scrum. Dependencies between Scrum team members, between User Stories, between core and extended team, between team and product owner – all have an impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of the team. I often see Scrum teams having dependencies on User Experience/Web Developers. This is because PO has [...]

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Scrum Product Owner Has to Kiss Lot of Frogs to Find a Prince

by Avienaash Shiralige May 22, 2012

I, am going to draw an interesting parallel – between a fairy tale princess and a Scrum Product Owner (PO). Just as the fairy tale princess may need to kiss many frogs before she finds her prince charming; a Scrum Product Owner has to do a lot of de-cluttering of backlog to identify features that [...]

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How to Use Sprint Burndown Chart in Daily Stand-up and Sprint Retrospective

by Avienaash Shiralige May 17, 2012

Sprint Burndown chart and Daily Stand-up help Scrum teams in Self-Organisation. Never use Sprint burndown chart in sprint review. Sprint Burndown is inward facing, i.e it is for Scrum Team. This chart summarise overall how team is doing? Every impediment, every challenge team faced, colloboration issues etc all get summarised in this chart. Teams need [...]

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Product Owner Role in Sprint Review(Sprint Demo)

by Avienaash Shiralige May 15, 2012

Sprint Review meeting facilitates developing a successful product. Hence it is a very good avenue for scrum team to directly interact with stakeholder to get their perspective. Product Owner(PO) who is responsible for overall product should facilitate having all the stakeholders like Marketing, Sales, Senior management, End Users to the demo. In my last post [...]

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Should Teams Go for Multiple Demos within a Sprint?

by Avienaash Shiralige May 11, 2012

Many scrum teams believe and practice sprint demo as part of sprint review meeting. Because Scrum says so. Formal demo end of sprint is a minimum requirement as per scrum guide. But it is not stopping you from doing more of so. I strongly believe in the principle that if you see value in doing something, [...]

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When is a Good Day to Start a Sprint?

by Avienaash Shiralige May 9, 2012

My first reaction would be Monday! Week is just starting and definitely good day to start something new. You are right! But my suggestion would be to rather focus on sprint ending day then starting. Ending on a Friday is not I have seen worked very well for many teams. Let’s check out few reasons [...]

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Agility is About Identifying and Achieving “Good Enough”

by Avienaash Shiralige May 8, 2012

Often I get to hear “how much documentation should I do”? How long should be my Sprint Planning or Sprint Retro? I say Just Barely Good Enough(JBGE). Check out below picture by Scott Ambler. This graph summarizes above questions using law of dimishing returns which shows value curve for an artifact being just barely good [...]

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An Apple a Day Does NOT Keep Doctor Away

by Avienaash Shiralige May 5, 2012

Let’s say one day you get up and say “I want to be more healthy”. You decide that I will start having apples everyday. You do it everyday for months keeping all your old habits of sleeping late, eating junk food, drinking alcohol,smoking etc. Do you think having all these habits and eating an apple [...]

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Strategy Making Should be More Agile

by Avienaash Shiralige April 19, 2012

Companies find it very tough to survive in current fast changing markets. You can not sit on a one year plan assuming that it will strike gold! You need to monitor your strategy implementation, measure it and make necessary changes. Some leaders who are extreme agile(giving complete autonomy) get this wrong and they pay the [...]

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