World Of Agile

Today businesses are shifting to emerging economies (such as India) due to reduced business operations cost and an easily available workforce. The businesses certainly are more virtual and distributed, with "distributed" as its key element. Thus the need for better managing such teams, using the right tools and processes, is becoming increasingly critical for any enterprise company. Here are some reasons for the shift and need for having distributed Agile teams: ·           Globally distributed teams reduce costs. ·           They can reach the market more quickly with a "follow the sun" model. ·           Distributed teams expand access to new markets. ·           Acquisitions as a result of consolidation results in companies working together to integrate their businesses. ·   ...

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. ...