On Agile teams, collaboration is the way of life. Our leaders want their team members to work closely with each other, have shared goals and even think as one entity. Why? Because we believe that collaboration leads to happier, more productive teams that can build innovative products/services.

It's strange that companies use the word collaboration very tightly with innovation. Collaboration is based on consensus building, which rarely leads to visionary or revolutionary products/services. Innovative/disruptive concepts require people to independently test out divergent ideas without getting caught up in collaborative boardroom meetings.

In this presentation, Naresh Jain explores the scary, unspoken side of collaboration and explains in what context, collaboration can be extremely important; and when it can get in the way or be a total waste of time.

This talk is an experience sharing session about what it takes to realize business benefits in a large-scale (beyond 100 people) agile transformation. Having driven more than 4 large-scale transformation initiatives (of scales 160 to 700 people) over last 5 years, I would be sharing a couple of case-studies where I worked recently and I would discuss various challenges of implementing large-scale transformation and possible approaches to handle them. Participants would be engaged through interactive discussions on mutual experience sharing with a focus on key dimensions of agile execution.

As the title reveals, the talk would focus more on execution challenges and approaches to handle them at all levels of stakeholders involved in a transformation. Levels include developers, architects, managers (project/engineering), senior management (delivery/program management, directors) and CXO's. More details in Outline section. 

The key dimensions to be covered include

1. Building and sustaining learning culture (approaches include Community of Practice, Guilds and Joint Workshops)
2. Causing the mindset shift in engineers (different approaches for developers, architects and engineering managers)
3. Enabling managers to create and nurture agile engineering culture (approaches include effective metrics about quality of code, tests, application and build)
4. Inverting the Test Pyramid (approaches include test automation strategies, BDD, dealing with Legacy using Strangler pattern, Component Guardian pattern)
5. Leadership Agility (approaches include catalyst style of leadership, risk driven decision making, leading the change)

This topic has popped up in my mind through an observation of a practical problem I found yesterday. I thought to apply some lean principles to resolve this problem. I am proposing the problem statement here in this forum and the idea is to have an interactive workshop to come up with possible solutions to address this problem using Lean thinking/principles. Here are the details.

Yesterday I visited Hyderabad Zoo (Nehru zoological Park) along with my cousins families. We are 12 members including adults and children. Earlier till November 2014, visitors cars were directly allowed inside with an additional fee of 200 rupees per car. I visited the Zoo before 2014 November and it was an awesome experience going by our own car and stop wherever you want for however long you want. Now, as they stopped allowing private cars inside, they arranged electric cars rides inside the Zoo. Below is the process and problem statement that I observed.

1. The fee for one adult is 50 Rs and child is 30 Rs for Electric car

2. Tickets will be given only at the entrance of the Zoo that is located outside the compound wall (You will not know how many members are waiting for electric cars inside)

3. Tickets once sold cannot be refunded or exchanged

4. There are limited electric cars available to cater the crowd (I got the info that around 25 cars)

5. Each ride takes 40 minutes. It will stop at various locations where you can get down the car and visit the animals and come back to go to next stop

6. Each car can take up to 12 members including the driver (

7. You have to get onto the car at only one starting location and get down at the same point after the ride is complete. If you want to give away the ride in between its fine up to you

The problems I observed and want to solve these problems by applying lean principles:

1. At the time of buying the tickets:

     a. I did not have any clue on how many cars are there inside

     b. How long each trip takes

     c. How many members are in waiting

     d. Whether I can take the car and leave it at some place and visit the animals and by the time I come back after my visit there can be some other car available to take me to next stop or not

2. I had to wait more than 1.5 hours to get my turn to have a car available

3. The driver told that if I can give him 300 Extra we can take our own time to visit and he will not mind (this is the primary cause of the long queues I observed)

4. Weekend visitors are more than 2 times of weekday visitors

5. The queue is not properly managed so at times I observed people are joining in the middle of the queue and making it even more worst

What I want to resolve:

1. Reduce the waiting time

2. Address the loophole of extending the ride by giving bribe to the car driver

3. Address the queue management inconsistencies

The 2015 state of scrum report published by Scrum Alliance states that the outlook of scrum is highly favourable. Virtually all consider it likely that their organization will use scrum in future. While this is good, the survey also noted one of the key challenges observed by survey respondents as “Product owners and teams were just not willing and/or enthusiastic about Scrum best practices”. Thus, although scrum methodologies have greatly increased productivity, scrum is not without its problems. We need to quickly address this gap.

Keeping scrum values at the core, scrum methodology is mostly visible to teams on the ground in terms of three pillars (1) Scrum roles (2) Scrum artifacts and (3) Scrum events. While Scrum has kept scrum roles and scrum artifacts lean, it has empowered teams on the ground to learn the art of performing scrum. Scrum prescribed guidance on scrum events with clear purpose, frequency, maximum duration and recommended attendees. It recommends teams to learn the art of performing scrum events through their experience stating “scrum is easy to understand and difficult to implement”

While some scrum teams mastered this art, I find most of the scrum teams are still struggling in this process. I come across situations where teams are not finding scrum events interesting primarily because they find these events unproductive. The result is that we see less interactions and cooperation from the teams during scrum events. This is impacting basic agile manifesto “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". In net, there is no surprise when product owners and teams were just not willing and/or enthusiastic about Scrum best practices.

Lean Scrum is the need of the hour. As part of lean scrum, we will adopt scrum methodology at the core and we implement lean framework to address the pain areas witnessed by teams

As part of this talk, I will share my experiential insights on

1. Outlook of scrum is highly favourable. Although scrum methodologies have greatly increased productivity, scrum is not without its problems. We need to quickly address these gaps
2. While scrum has kept scrum roles and scrum artifacts lean, it has empowered teams on the ground to learn the art of performing scrum events. Are we keeping these events lean and Valuable?
3. Lean scrum – The need of the hour
4. What is Lean Scrum
5. Anti-Patterns/Most frequently faced challenges/ wastes experienced by scrum teams in each of the scrum events (case findings based on my experience)
6. Where do the scrum teams stand on "expected scrum patterns" in each of the scrum events (case findings based on my experience)
7. Leverage "Lean Framework" to craft scrum events towards value generation. How to draw "AS-IS" and "TO-BE" Value stream management maps for two scrum events.
8. Leverage "Lean framework" to help scrum teams to learn the art of performing scrum events through realizing value and enhancing their reach on "expected scrum patterns".
9. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software” The term value is increasingly becoming starting point of what we do. We need to keep questioning everything we do using customer value generation as the yard stick

Unless, we drive scrum events towards value generation by continuously eliminating waste/ anti patterns, there is no surprise that “Product owners and teams were just not willing and/or enthusiastic about Scrum best practices” as observed by "The 2015 state of scrum" report.

This is where Lean-scrum could prove to be powerful...

This is a concept I devised a couple of years ago, and it seems there is a new #NoEstimates audience that would like to know more about it.

A Slicing Heuristic is essentially:

An explicit policy that describes how to "slice" work Just-In-Time to help us create consistency, a shared language for work and better predictability.

The Slicing Heuristic seeks to replace deterministic estimation rituals by incorporating empirical measurement of actual cycle times for the various types of work in your software delivery lifecycle.

It is based on the hypothesis that empiricism leads to smaller cycle time duration and variation (which in business value terms means quicker time to market and better predictability) because it requires work to be sliced into clear, simple, unambiguous goals. Crucially, the heuristic also describes success criteria to ensure it is achieving the level of predictability we require.

Its application is most effective when used for all levels of work, but can certainly be used for individual work types. For example, a User Story heuristic can be an extremely effective way of creating smaller, simpler work increments, allowing teams to provide empirical forecasts without the need for estimating how long individual stories will take. However, if you are able to incorporate this concept from the portfolio level down, the idea is that you define each work type (e.g. Program, Project, Feature, User Story, etc.) along with a Slicing Heuristic, which forms part of that work type’s Definition of Ready.

This talk will equip teams and organisations who are established on their Agile journey with a robust, clear and repeatable method for improving the quality and time-to-market of their software development efforts.

Effective "Code-branching" strategies are still one of the most ignored in Agile development world. In this talk, using case-studies, I would like to present what is wrong with traditional strategies, how it hinders teams to deliver continuously and why Trunk Based Development (TBD) is a durable solution. Furthermore, the talk aims to explore various strategies (code/dev and ops) that enable teams to attain TBD. Finally, the talk ends with successful TBD case-studies.

Cross functional team (CFT) as a whole has all the skills needed to build the product, and that each team member is willing to do more than just their own thing. Agile methodologies recommend long lived CFTs to implement agile manifesto and principles effectively. CFTs have become more popular in recent years for many reasons that include but not limited to:

1. They improve coordination and integration
2. They are flexible to adapt to changing market needs
3. They develop innovative products more quickly
4. They span across organization boundaries
5. They improve problem solving and lead to more thorough decision making

To be precise, we are not fully agile if we do not nurture CFTs. Not far from now, you will see digital enterprises trying to compete with each other in developing and releasing their apps every 5 days.  CFTs will become one of the fundamental pillars for agile methodologies to adapt to such aggressive future needs

Building CFTs is an art and nurturing collaboration among CFTs is even more challenging. In this talk, I will explain about

(1) Building Cross Functional Teams by Example

(2) Nurturing Cross-functional Team Collaboration

(3) Imperative elements that need to be considered for succeeding with cross functional teams. Without proper attention to these elements, any cross-functional team will be fighting an uphill battle to succeed.

Although agile methodologies have greatly increased productivity, Agile is not without its problems. Agile recommends adaptive planning through its multi-level planning events. Agile planning is expected to remain relevant in guiding teams till their destination as it incorporates the then risks, issues, assumptions and constraints into consideration while planning at last responsible moments.

While it appears good on paper, I find challenges involved in this approach. Scrum teams on the ground may mostly focus their efforts on their team specific daily and sprint targets. They lack common understanding of team expectations on what is probable product that they think is possible at the moment with the list of the then risks, assumptions, constraints and dependencies. To be precise, teams on the ground lack this bottom up view of the integrated probable product in next 2 to 4 months

On the other hand, enterprises spend efforts and money for their strategy, portfolio and product planning exercises. The result is that these planning events tell the top down view of “Where Product owner want to take the product to be?”

When top down view and bottom up view are not properly balanced with proper discussion among stakeholders during release planning exercise, we see teams oscillating instead of iterating witnessing below symptoms.

• Teams slips on their release forecast
• Cross team dependencies are detected towards end of the release and there was not much time available to resolve those dependencies within the release
• Key decisions that were supposed to be taken during release planning exercise, would be taken up towards final sprints.
• Risks are identified towards the end and this gives less room to mitigate the risks

When these symptoms recur periodically, as an enterprise, we would not be in position to provide the expected functionality to the end users. This may ultimately hit team’s morale and enterprise brand. Part of this chaotic pattern may be attributed to agile planning events.

This can be overcome if we perform release planning exercise effectively. But surprisingly, not much literature is available on how to perform release planning exercise even though everybody underlines its importance. In result, we see anti patterns keep creeping and they derail release planning objectives.

In this talk, I will be listing potential probable anti patterns that can derail teams from achieving their expected outcomes. I will introduce each pattern in the format

• Anti-Pattern
• Potential Impact
• How to address this anti-pattern

If performed well, release planning exercise makes stakeholders meet together and discuss the challenges involved in unifying the top down understanding of “What the product Owner wants the product to be” with the bottom up understanding of “what the development teams thinks as the possible product scope that can be accomplished”. This inturn will be input to upcoming product planning events. Release planning thus acts as a guide post to baseline current understanding of team expectations on what is probable product that they think is possible at the moment with the list of the then risks, assumptions, constraints and dependencies.

Remote working in an Agile world

My experience of being a remote tester in an agile team

Main statement:

What does it mean to you/your colleagues/your company if you are a remote worker? How is it different to being an ‘office worker’? Let’s find out!

Abstract

Picture this!  – I landed a job with a company and team that I had wanted for a long time. Everything was going to plan until after about a year when I faced relocating to a far off land due to personal reasons. Imagine having to give up a job that you love and believe is going to be good for your career progression. Imagine working for a company that’s so awesome that, when I told them I had to move, they offered me the chance to become a full time remote worker!

This was about 6 months ago and I have been a full time remote tester since then. I have learnt a lot during this time and want to share my experiences with you.

Geographical limitations no longer stop people from working on awesome teams, or stop companies recruiting the right testers for the job. There are huge benefits for the remote worker and the company alike.  However, there are also drawbacks on both sides and remote working is not something to take lightly.

At NewVoiceMedia we run a ‘Remote Working Community of Interest’ where we tackle some of the difficulties faced by remote workers as well as enjoy the benefits. To make remote working work there have to be changes made by the remote worker, the company and the colleagues who work in the office.  I want to present what these changes could be and could potentially mean to you, and your team.

This is a fast paced workshop of 90 minutes, split across 3 progressive parts/activities. The intent of the workshop is to bring out the challenges that organizations face due to their traditional structure, during their Agile adoption journey. In the workshop, we emulate such an environment and try to have a first-hand experience of the difficulties faced both at the team and managerial levels (Part A). Subsequently, we let people form their own teams which are "Autonomous". (Part B). Now, we deliver as newly formed teams. (Part C).

The final debrief revolves around importance of "Autonomous teams" in terms of quality and individual motivation.

What about a case where the whole team is completely distributed, i.e. every team member works from home, possibly from a different country or from a different time-zones. What about the challenges faced by a team where team-members are distributed with 7-8 time-zones.

In the new era of Lean Startup, some startups are working and developing software in this fashion. This session is a case-study of one such startup which is completely distributed. How they are working, are they using Agile or have evolved some new practices which work for them. What kind of different challenges these teams face on regular basis and how do they solve them, these are some of the question this session tries to answer.

High performance agile teams are always striving to achieve an effective retrospective that enables the team to discuss the success criteria, and define the areas of improvement further.  This is an important aspect for cross functional teams – the development, operations, database administrators, systems administrators, QA testers, product managers - to focus on excellent communication and collaboration. 

Over the years, my experience has been that retrospectives can get monotonous with time, and hence tend to become ineffective. The more I engaged with the process, the more I felt the need to revolutionize the process, bring out something new, fun, and exciting to make the retrospectives vibrant.  The other interesting aspect I came across during my research into the subject was the theory of gamification and the universality of its application. 

During this session the audience will understand how the concept of gamification brings in a completely different dimension of thinking while maintaining the element of fun as we try and apply it to a few everyday situations!

 I have leveraged Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games, The Conteneo Collaboration Could platform for this concept of gamification so that distributed teams can benefit by this.  

This is an experience report based on my interactions with the Product Owners. 

Scrum introduces a very vital role called the Product Owner who is the key person responsible for the product success; he is one who is accountable for the customer delight.

 In this session we would talking about essential characteristics  and responsibilities of a PO by discussing some of the challenges using specific scenarios.

Format of this session:

1) Commonly seen anti patterns of the PO

2) Typical challenges that can derail a Product Ownership and what can be done to overcome these challenges. These challenges if not resolved, which agile principle we would not be able to adhere to will also be discussed during this session. The scenarios presented here are the real time scenarios that I have seen with the teams while working with them.

The idea of this session is to talk about the challenges seen with the Product group  in big organizations that have a legacy of products and multiple teams working on them.

• For instance, one should know the clear difference between hygienic practices vs context based practices - the first ones are not to be compromised at any cost, whereas the latter ones are to be applied based on the need, not because some framework prescribes it.

• For example, in the Execution Phase, doing pair programming and following TDD are hygienic practices for us. Having said that, it’s perfectly okay for a pair to split and work on a specific task on a case-to-case basis (we call this Pragmatic Programming) and the pair decides when and how long they would split and when to re-join.

• Started almost 3 years ago, on-going
• 10 quarterly planning workshops done so far
• 10+ teams, 7 timezones
• peak program size: 250+
• peak team size from my org.: 50+
• total no of systems: 10+
• geographical spread: plan: 100 countries, 132 locales launched so far: 53 countries, 56 locales
• 140 page-views / sec
• Av. response time: 1.3s
• Handling 100+K products in the catalog, 15+ K pages , 300+ K responsive images
• Blue-Green production deployment (zero downtime over 1.5 years)
• 3 weeks cycle of production releases

TBD