Agile – A culture shift and getting used to it

When you transition away from the world of Waterfall to Agile, you may get a sense of being a little disorganised at least initially. For example, with Waterfall you document and do everything in an order with a documented outcome before the next step is taken, which is almost synonymous to being organised. So when you move away from Waterfall to Agile, you are experiencing a cultural shift in the way you work.  If you take pride in being organised as an individual then you may get initial shock when you are introduced to the world of Agile. So resistance is all but natural. Let me share my take on what goes on when you have spent years mastering waterfall and then you are asked to go Agile.

To start with, let’s take a quick look at some of the dictionary meanings of ‘being organised‘.

– arrange systematically
– arrange according to a particular system
– Able to plan one’s activities efficiently.

Now, Agile on the other hand gives you 4 guiding principles as defined in Agile Manifesto and these are

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

So you have 4 vaguely sounding boundaries. Now every single principle in the manifesto can be interpreted in many ways and hence there are multiple possibilities to execute a project. Therefore, Agile comes loaded with a number of frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, XP among others to help you stay organised and execute things efficiently. To give you an analogy, think of Agile as PHP, and Agile Frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban as PHP Frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony, etc.

Adapting to a new culture

It takes some time and effort before one can get used to a new culture. Any cultural change requires one to

• be open minded to unlearn and learn
• be curious and to ask questions
• take help from someone who knows the culture
• read about the culture
• be ready to make mistakes
• find someone who is undertaking the similar journey

One can become anxious during the process but it pays to be patient. And so when you are out to learn Agile frameworks, keep the above guidelines in mind.

Choosing a language

Agile has number of frameworks to choose from. Some of the popular ones are Scrum, Kanban, XP and Lead. I’m only familiar with the first two. So will talk about these.

Let’s look at their origins to understand their use cases.

• SCRUM was created by someone who wanted to bring down the cost and time of software development projects.
• Kanban was created on a factory floor in an operation environment.

So I’ll say choose SCRUM for projects in development and Kanban for projects post-development i.e. when in Operation.

Each Agile framework has its own set of activities, roles and artefacts that help you produce software efficiently. I’ll refrain from choosing the word ‘organised’ in the context of Agile frameworks since that’s not their primary goal.

Before I conclude this post, let me remind you what happens when you learn a new culture – you may forget the previous one! 😉

References

• https://agilemanifesto.org/
• https://cmhc.utexas.edu/cultureadjustment.html

 

Catching up!

I have not really posted anything in more than 2 years. Not that anyone was waiting for me to write but when I write on a topic, it takes me into thinking zone, which you hardly get when your days and nights are occupied by your smartphone📱.

I’m not so much on Social Media but still, there is so much that you can read, listen and watch on your mobile phone that you hardly get enough attention span to read a book. The result – it takes lot of time & effort to complete a book. In fact, I can’t even recall when I last finished a book from cover to cover.

The same mobile phone that affected my reading habit, I’m now using it to reclaim the same habit by adopting to listening🎧.

I have always been an avid book reader, which made me buy my first kindle in 2012 when it was not even launched in India. I have not bought any paper books since then (except for my children). I used to even read blogs on Kindle by pushing article using a handy browser extensions from FiveFilters. This extension is amazing and works better than the one from Amazon.

Recently though I have migrated to Audible on my mobile phone, which I’m still trying to adjust to. I still can’t let go of my Kindle Paperwhite. Reading on the white screen of kindle is just amazing. Alas, use of laptop and mobile phone have taken toll on my eyes so have no option but to use Audible where I can, specially for books that don’t have any diagrams or info-graphic. The best part of audible is that its not some artificial voice but voice by humans (mostly professional artists).

My transition from Kindle to Audible happened recently when Amazon India launched Audible in India and offered 3 free credits that allowed me to experience Audible for 3 months. The first book I listen on Audible while taking morning walk was biography on Elon Musk and I loved it. So I then tried ‘Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time‘ by Jeff Sutherland, which made me a fan of Audible. Then I spent my third credit on an Amazon Original on Science Fiction since I wanted to see what Amazon could do with Audible. Well, this Amazon Original is like watching a movie with your eyes closed. Honestly, I’m not sold to the idea, at least not yet. I’ll prefer the solo voice like in the earlier two books and rather watch a movie with eyes open. 🙂

I’ll try to share my thoughts and experience on my favourite topics more regularly. Hoping to keep the promise to myself this time.

See you soon!

I’m into Agile now!

Few years back I was reluctant to turn to Agile methodology and even wrote a not so flattering post about Agile. May be because I wasn’t well informed or may be Agile movement was just kicking off and shaking things or may be I was just too comfortable doing what I thought was best or may be all of these factors.

It’s not anymore and I’m into Agile albeit not a purist! And that’s fine since you can still be Agile even if you are not following it 100% or even 50%. This last sentence is very important since this simple realisation helped me get started with Agile. And I got this from a book that made me feel that I’m not alone who thinks Agile should not be looked at – either 100% or none at all. The book was – Agile Project Management for dummies! This book doesn’t sell Agile, instead it tell you what Agile does and what it doesn’t.

With at least one book on my side, I then moved to another book that was selling Agile and scrum but in very few pages. The book was – Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction. In fact, if you are new to Agile and believe in learning fast as in fast food, never buy a book with hundreds of pages. I feel they are a scam to take money out of your pocket but don’t add much value – IMHO. Moreover, Agile was supposed to be simple, so why explain it in hundreds of pages?

Coming back to the above book, it doesn’t take long for you to finish this book and it really gives you what you need – an itch to try it on a real project!

My next challenge was to sell the idea to management and team. Well it seems management wasn’t ready for fear of derailing projects from a predefined template that everyone was comfortable doing. And team didn’t seem to care much. So I took a middle path and went for hybrid – planned entire project in advance (management was happy) but then executed using sprints with duration of 2 weeks each. First time I was getting to try something new in project management albeit at a smaller scale. This came out to be a success and I got to complete project on time with everyone’s satisfaction. And this was a start for me.

Today, I don’t ever consider waterfall as an option and use Agile in every project using either Scrum or Kanban.

Screenshot and Video based bug reporting

During a recent recruitment drive for a tester in my company, I realised that while there has been a flood of tools and techniques to ease the web development work, there has hardly been any significant development in the domain of testing. We used to have testers reporting bugs the same way 10 years back as they are doing now – typing text in an excel sheet or a web based interface like Mantis or BugZilla and sometimes attaching screenshots to support their findings.

Browser version?

When was the last time you bothered about version in Firefox & Chrome during web development? As of today, I know the latest version of Internet Explore, Safari and Opera. With some effort I can recall Firefox version but I have no idea of the current version of Google Chrome. By the time you read this post, there may be a new Google Chrome version. Almost!

Threat profiling of project team members

The worst nightmare a project manager can have is the exit of one of the team member from an in-progress project. A lot of times it happens when you least expect it. The choices you make during the exit of a particular team member can have direct implications on the future of project and performance of other team members. You would be the luckiest project manager if you get a near match when a replacement joins your team. In other words, you will be spending late hours at work for the rest of the project duration.