World Of Agile

Information radiators are meant to display information at a public place so that the information can be noticed by as many people as possible without making a conscious effort to do so. The idea of information radiator was invented by Alister Cockburn, who was a big believer in effective and timely communication. Information Radiators should display the current information about the project whatever is critical for the team to learn. It could include Schedule, tasks, issues, progress etc. The Most common forms of Information Radiators are ·         TaskBoards or Kanban Boards ·         Big Visible Charts such as BurnDown Charts ·         Street Lights and Lava Lamps Characteristics of Information Radiators which make the Information Radiators work ·         Simplicity : The information Radi...

The Primary Team roles in scrum are named as • Product Owner  • Scrum Master • Development Team Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Team are considered as people who are committed to the project while customers and executive management are considered as involved but not committed to the project. 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.  Cross-functional teams have all competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others not part of the team. The team model in Scrum is designed to optimize flexibility, creativity, and productivity. Scrum Teams deliver products iteratively and incrementally, maximizing opportunities for feedback. Incremental deliveries of “Done” product ensure a potentially useful version of working product is always available. All the roles are based on the concept of “S...

Skills of a Product Owner Choosing the right product owner is crucial for any Scrum Project. Following are some of the characteristics expected from the Product Owner ·           Visionary : Product owner should be able to envision the final product. ·           Doer : Product owner should also be a doer – that means, he should work with the team to get the final product ready. ·           Product Owner should be a Leader and Team Player ·           Communicator : The product owner must be an effective communicator and negotiator. The Product Owner is the Voice of the customer and therefore he should communicate customer needs and requirements and bridge the gap between the customer and the team. This may mean saying NO sometimes to the customer. ·        ...

There are FIVE phases that an Agile project goes thru. The FIVE phases are ·         Envision ·         Speculate ·         Explore ·         Adapt ·         Close Envision Phase : – This phase is to determine the product vision and project scope, the project community, and how the team will work together. The term ‘envision’ is a clear departure from traditional phase names such as initiate and plan, which while subtle, is also significant. This is because when envisioning you inadvertently accept a level of mishap and are therefore ready to make any necessary adjustments, in contrast to a set plan which has more rigorous connotations. The envision phase covers the ‘Who? What? And how?’ Speculation Phase:  Unlike planning, speculating esta...

Over the years, Agile methodologies have taken the heat when they appear to have failed to deliver expected benefits to an organization. If our project fails, the tendency is that “we must blame the Agile process and our practices in some way for this”. Agile is not a magic stick to save a failing project and bring immediate results. It lets you uncover better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. As with all development methods, the skill and experience of users determine the degree of success and/or abuse of such activity. So sometimes we obtain the agility by making up our own variation of this methodology. In this case, failure of this project should largely be incumbent upon us for deciding to sacrifice the practices we chose to ignore and the new ones we added.  Some are Agile while just for namesake, and following no methodology, just cherry-picking a couple of practices here and there, and picking the principles they like. ...