Category Archives: Agile Methodology
How to Estimate A Story in An Agile SCRUM Sprint
Wondering on how to estimate a set of business requirements into one or more Agile SCRUM Sprints? Go on reading further and let me know what you think. If you are planning to work/develop software based on Agile SCRUM development model and are looking out for an estimation model, here it goes. Quick Overview on Agile SCRUM Before I go into presenting the model, let me present a quick introduction to Agile SCRUM development model. Agile software development is a set of software development methods that are based on iterative and incremental method, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Following is taken from Agile Manifesto …
Attention Developers: Take Care of Your Debts
Hmm.. was the title intriguing enough for you to check out if you as a developer got any debts to clear (such as that represented below :-)? Well, I am talking about what is called as “technical debt” and that is it. 🙂 Believe me, there are high possibilities that most of the developers do have technical debts to clear which they (or someone else) introduce in the system while working on it over a period of time. Lets try and understand what/how/why/whens related with technical debt? As Fowler writes in his blog, technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this …
Atlassian Confluence-JIRA Integration to Strengthen Agile Portfolio
Earlier this week, Enterprise software toolmaker Atlassian announced tighter integration between its JIRA issue tracking application and its Confluence team collaboration platform. With this move, they have further strengthened their agile portfolio. Following is the list of software in their agile portfolio: Confluence: Confluence pages are used to maintain requirements (stories), technical specs, design guidelines, etc. Confluence pages are linked with JIRA thus linking requirements/technical specs to stories. JIRA: JIRA is used to maintain epics/stories and issues. There are several blueprints in JIRA created to manage status reports, retrospective meetings etc. The new JIRA Report Blueprint allows development teams to create an ad-hoc status report or a change log in Confluence. The new Retrospective Blueprint gives scrum masters, …
What does Agile Team Composition Look Like?
[adsenseyu2] If you are starting on new on agile methodology for application development, the question on what does agile team composition look like is a commonly asked one? The article presents the agile team composition for SCRUM development model. Given the fact that there will be multiple agile teams which may work towards release one or more products in an organization, following questions get tricky: Do we need one business analyst for each SCRUM team? How to deal with performance engineers? Should there be one in each team, or should there be centralized team? How to seal with security specialists? Again, should there be one security specialists for each team, or …
Testing Early, Testing Often for Greater Success in Agile SCRUM
In my experiences, I have found two different approaches taken towards testing in Agile SCRUM: Testers creating test plans while interacting with BAs, as like in waterfall model, in the beginning of each sprint, and executing those tests once the development is done. In this model, testers and developers still managed to survive successfully in their own islands/worlds and things used to move. However, there is not much interaction and collaboration between developers and testers during development phase. There are chances of usual conflicts that happens in the world of development and testing. Testers creating test plans with help of BAs, collaborating on test cases, related with user stories, with …
How to Address Application Performance in Agile Scrum Teams
Given the nature SCRUM, two quality characteristics that takes back seat and considered as implicit are performance and security. I shall discuss the approach on how to address application performance while working with agile SCRUM teams. Before I go and list down the tips and techniques, let’s understand some of the constraints: Not all developers working in SCRUM teams are very familiar with application performance aspects It may get difficult to do performance testing at the end of each sprint. It may get difficult to articulate performance related user stories in each sprint. Given above constraints, it becomes much more important to address performance related issues in SCRUM model. Following …
How to Address Application Security in Agile Scrum Teams?
One of the concerns that takes the back burner while setting up the agile SCRUM teams is application security. One other area that gets similar behavior like security is performance which shall be addressed in later articles. However, performance gets addressed quickly as it is key quality characteristic and gets noticed by end users very quickly. In the traditional waterfall based development model, security gets fair attention as the non functional requirements related with security gets captured in the initial stages and the team gets composed of at least one security officer/specialist/architect to take care of security requirements. However, having a security specialist/officer in each SCRUM team is not feasible …
SCRUM Style Best Suited for Fresher Developers
One of the key concern that freshers’ developers, mostly under probation period, have been found to have is biased behavior of the manager in-charge towards a set of developers in assigning development tasks primarily during training period. This is the time when managers have also rate these developers and it is a very tricky part for the managers to take the right judgement. Thus, what can be the most effective way which creates win-win for both, freshers developer in terms of having them work/learn at their will and also managers be able to make the right judgement. To crack this problem and create a fair playground for all, I have …
A Centralized R&D Team – Key to Highly Performing Agile Scrum Teams
If you have an Agile SCRUM based development center that consists of multiple SCRUM teams to working on different features and functionality of one or more product, you always have the concerns in relation with highly performing teams in terms of usage of relevant and latest technologies from time-to-time. One of the key challenges in front of SCRUM teams is to make sure that they are using most appropriate technologies at all point of time. This can be achieved in multiple different manners. Some of them are following: Set aside stories for research & development of new tools & frameworks to be done in each sprints. Stories of such kind, …
Key Considerations for Application Security & Agile SCRUM Team Composition
Before going into the SCRUM team composition in relation with application security, it can be worth while knowing what are key aspects of secured application development practices: Security awareness training Threat modeling Secured coding practices Secured code reviews Security testing Achieving the state of secured application development practices is one of the toughest challenges for most SCRUM MASTERS to crack. For achieving secured application development, different alternatives could be explored to build the team, depending on software development methodology including agile and non agile methodologies. For agile development based on SCRUM model, following alternatives can be explored: Security Officer/Adviser/Architect: The role of the security adviser is to counsel various SCRUM teams …
Top 5 Project Management Topics for Technology Geeks
If you have been the technology geeks and want to learn topics in project management to manage your work, following are five most important topics in project management you would want to consider: Scope management: Helps you to determine the scope of the deliverables Time management: This is related with effort estimation Quality management: The is related with overall quality of your deliverables Risk management: This relates to overall risk of your projects. Communication management: This one relates to communication done to external and internal stakeholders.
Agile Design Documents with WebSequenceDiagram Tool
Earlier, I wrote a blog on how to write a winner design document when working in Agile Scrum methodology. The blog has been based on my experience while working with distributed SCRUM manner. Disbelief in Design Documentation for Agile SCRUM I have come across various sections of people who did not believe in design document at all when working in SCRUM manner. Their argument has been that SCRUM is all about encouraging technical discussions through different manners such as white-boarding etc and, adopting design documentation just kills the overall objective. I agree to some extent given the entire team is working at one place and could do quick discussions including …
Learnt Agile Development Processes. Now, What’s Next?
The first step when an organization decides to adopt agile development methodology is to look out for a Agile coach who can train the team on agile development processes. For example, an organization either want to adopt extreme programming practices or SCRUM development practices; Once decided, agile coach take team through the specifics of the development processes. For instance, if one wants to go with SCRUM, one would be made aware of some of the following concepts/stages: Sprint Planning/Backlogs Estimation/Velocity Implementation Reterospectives Burn down charts Well, once the teams get aware of the above procedures as part of agile development process, they get down to adopting the process. However, in …
How to Really Welcome Changing Requirements in Agile Environment
If you are one of those who is all set to start with agile development practices in your organization, check the following on how to deal with changing requirements which is one of the important specifications mentioned in Agile Manifesto. If you want your team to accept the idea of changing requirements (hard to digest in the beginning and so resistance) while they are developing the code, following are some of the things you would want to adopt/encourage as part of software development practices to really make team welcome the changing requirements: Training: Software quality with emphasis on how to write maintainable/easy-to-change code Object oriented design principles to ensure the …
