Talks about partial successes with Agile implementations. We have become iterative for sure and there is a definite sense of cadence. But concept to cash lead times are still quite high. A sense of dogma has crept in the rituals, they happen, but there is little soul.Team members are still quite stressed out; We have avoided the famous waterfall death march for sure but it is still a very tiring and painful long march.  Organisations doesn't feel that they have reaped all the benefits which were promised. There is just a handful of companies who seem to be living the values and are  really nimble in the market place. What went wrong?

Our focus on people, value, flow and quality instead of process,tools, cost, schedule and scope, got the attention but did not get internalised by all. So while we are adopting “Agile” methods we have not become “agile” yet.

There is a need to get back to first principles. There is a need to explain knowledge workers on the ground “Why” the principles work. Leaders need to do more than just support the change, they need to know, behave and do the right things. Lastly people do need to learn and love their craft. Yes, it is about money but is it also about autonomy, mastery and purpose.

The session takes through key concepts around people, business value, product development flow and quality via fast feedback, and invokes people to understand and let their team understand the basic principles  first to lay a strong foundation, before building an Agile enterprise on top of it. It is only then the “real transformation” happens and the products get in front of the end users faster.

With business agility the new watchword in senior management circles, more and more enterprises are looking for ways to adopt ‘agile’ into their technology practices. However, such an initiative needs to go beyond the mere adoption of agile in a few projects. To successfully implement enterprise IT agility, organizations need to understand the impact of agile across functions and groups, develop frameworks to sustain agile, empower teams across the board to work in an agile fashion, and invest in the right infrastructure. A strategic roadmap based on these considerations can help organizations infuse agile into their practices, processes and systems, thereby achieving true benefits of agile – faster returns, better quality and quicker time-to-market.

This session  discusses the critical factors for an effective roadmap to implementing enterprise IT agility. It also outlines how these factors contribute to a successful enterprise IT agility strategy.

For teams developing & maintaining mobile apps for both Android & iOS platforms, functional testing is a huge challenge. With the advent of Agile practices, behavior driven testing has gained more popularity. The current process of updating apps over the air is very easy, raising users’ expectations of new features delivered sooner.

Appium has made it easier for teams to test their apps for multiple platforms. However, it alone cannot solve the challenges around implementing behavior driven development & frequent UI/functionality updates. So we created a robust Test Framework combining the best features of Appium, Cucumber-jvm & Page Objects.

Cucumber-jvm is a key tool in implementing BDD. Page Objects is a framework design approach for maintaining & accessing components & controls spread across test scenarios. Appium provides a JSON bridge that allows test cases to be written once, and run for multiple mobile platforms. Integrating the powerful features of these 3 tools, we can create a powerful framework that is easy to setup, use, scale and maintain.

This is a workshop to introduce the concept of Value and cost based prioritization. The speaker will facilitate a short game for participants to learn how to prioritize the backlong using value and cost. 

Agile Product development with Scrum is based on completing a set of User Stories within a time-box called a sprint. Stories describing user functionality. Conversatin with customer is the means of elaborating requirement. looks simple, right?

Only User Stories are enough for product development? If not, what all other documents are necessary and how these are progressively elaborated? 

What's required before agile team start sprinting? What are the challenges while transitioning from waterfall to agile related to product requirement?

What's the role of Business Analyst in agile? BA moving into an agile team, moving to Product Owner? Can Business Analyst and Product Owner co-exist?

In this session, we discuss about the few facilitation techniques that a servant leader need to have to promote self-organization.

We also focus on Evolution of an Agile team, the traits of an agile leader and various of pit falls that do not lead to self organization.

How do you really make a team being controlled by a manager to become self- coordinating team?

We also look at key behaviours that helps changes stick.

How you think defines how you act.  Agile is more of a people practice than huge technical methodology. 

In traditional setup with waterfall methodology where each phase of the projects are serially aligned and more often than not take longer, testing is slow paced and quite reactionary. When moving to an agile setup, it requires a paradigm shift in the mindset. 

Its important to open our minds towards not only learning more technical but also soft skills and inspire our teams to do so too. Moving from competition to collaboration (with developers), moving from mere bug finding to bug investigation, moving to exploratory testing.

Emphasis is laid on team members and interactions instead of processes and tools. The idea is to encourage testers to think more about Agile as mentioned in Agile Manifesto than getting blindly into agile projects.

-The Sprint Planning meeting is just too long and never finishes on time.

-I finished my tasks on time, the story couldn’t be completed as there was a dependency on him. I just didn’t have time to follow it up. Not my fault.

-Yet again, there are left over items in the sprint. We couldn’t finish all the committed stories as some of them were too complex for their correct effort complexity estimation.

-Ohh Gosh, once again the priority of the tasks have changed in the middle of the sprint, there are new urgent items that have to be done. My sprint commitments have gone for a toss.

-We moved to Agile from waterfall and it has been few sprints into it, though even here vision is unclear, requirements are evolving and our sprint commitments are failing. Velocity is just been a number, Burn down graphs conclude nothing concrete and useful.

-How do we cater support/maintenance work with Scrum?

Does any of the above statement sound familiar to you, if yes probably it is the time to evolve and adopt KanScrumBan wrapped around XP practices.

KanScrumBan is the combination of Kanban and Scrum and uses the best features of both. While Scrum framework helps the software development teams to self-organize, collaborate, improve efficiency constantly, work in small iterations, and avoid management overhead, applying lean methods like Kanban , flavored with XP practices can extend these benefits.

Why do we need team agreements?

Scrum teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team. To become self-organized, a team has to go through various stages of team development.

Tuckman's stages of team development The "forming, storming, norming, performing" model of team development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965. He maintained that these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for a team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions, to plan work, and to deliver results.

A Scrum team does not have the luxury to be in each of these stages for much time, as it is expected to deliver right from the first sprint. Thus the need for formulating team agreements arises at an early stage. Sprint Zero is the ideal time for a Scrum team to go through all of these stages within a very short period. As Scrum is iterative and incremental, a Scrum team goes through Tuckman's stages in each sprint and improves its performance in every new sprint.

Knowing what kind team agreement a Scrum team might need is useful for the team members. It helps avoid conflicts. This knowledge can help them set the team agreements in advance during Sprint Zero rather than deciding what should be done at the last moment, in the middle of working sprints. Team agreements can be defined and agreed upon in a meeting facilitated by the ScrumMaster. Various steps that can performed in this meeting are: prepare, brainstorm, sort, categorize, agree, and refine