What is Your Leadership Style?
Here are few stories to illustrate Leadership styles of of few leaders: Leader 1: Ram is an expert technologist and is recently promoted as a manager for the product he has …
Blog
Dual Roles in Scrum, Is It Good or Bad?
This is a very common question I get in most CSM workshops. It is hard to say without knowing the context. So, I generally give the following guidance. Ask your …
Did you Fail in a ScrumMaster Interview? It may not be Your Fault!
Recently I referred one of my students to a company which I am also coaching. The person I referred is pretty good in agile concepts, however he was not selected. …
How to Choose a Scrum Training Program
With so many agile certifications, trainers and training companies around, are you confused with where to go and what to do? This article could be a help in deciding your …
How I Mentored, Counselled and Coached my Son for a Math Competition
My younger son, Harshith, is now getting into his high school (9th Grade). I am a true believer that building self-learning capability in kids is very important. I kept encouraging …
Interior Design Project for my New Home was a “Fixed Bid”
This question always comes in my CSM class that can a Fixed Bid project be agile? It could be if you run it correctly. Lets understand little bit here what …
My Son’s Parent Teacher Meeting (PTM) got Better!
Every time there is a PTM, it’s lot of time spent with little value. We spend almost the whole morning and end up meeting one or two teachers at most. …
What to expect in Advanced CSM (A-CSM) Workshop
Almost all my A-CSM students told me that what they expected from the workshop is totally different from what it really is. Most of them thought it is some more …
Scrum doesn’t work in my organisation!
This is the statement I hear a lot in my Certified Scrum Master (CSM) classes in India. I got used to this statements after running close 150 workshops. When we …
Should your team do Daily Scrum daily?
Scrum Framework suggests that the Development Team sync up everyday for maximum of 15 minutes so that all team members can inspect where they are in achieving the sprint goal …
Is it OK to Convert Story Points to Days/Hours?
If you know how to convert Story Points to Days or Hours, why estimate in one way and convert them into other way? You could directly estimate in time units, …
Is Scrum Enough?
Scrum is a process framework designed for new product development. Scrum is a guidance with few rules. But is it enough to do your product development? Probably not! As soon …
Roles in Scrum Organization – You Get-In or Get-Out
Scrum recognizes only 3 roles, ScrumMaster, Product Owner and the Development team. Scrum is a process framework for product development. For product development, we need someone who knows what to …
Path to Certified Scrum Professional (CSP-SM) for ScrumMaster
I have been getting lots of questions around how does one can become Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) from Scrum Alliance. I would like to take a crack at explaining path …
Certification or Knowledge – Where should you focus?
After running more than 100 Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) workshops, I would like to reflect little bit on where the workforce is going, especially in India! I hear these comments often: …
Coding Kata using TDD with my son
My son, Hardhik, started to learn programming using C++. He is freshman undergrad (1st year engineering). I thought of introducing TDD way of doing the programming so that he will …
My experience teaching Scrum to a non-profit organization
I recently received a request from a non-profit organization that they would like to join my CSM class. However, they have expressed that they can’t afford to pay the fee …
Agile talk with a 11 year old
I saw my 11 years old, Harshith, studying French this morning. He has opted for French as his second language. He is pretty good with learning new languages, so I …
My son is applying for colleges.. Agile at our rescue
My son, Hardhik, is in 12th grade and now is busy applying for colleges in USA. As many of you know, college application process takes lot of time and he has …
Scrum Master Effectiveness – Indian Context – Part 3
This is the Part 3 and last post of this series. Problem #3: Scrum Masters are not well trained The problem statement is that the Scrum Masters don’t have enough …
Scrum Master Effectiveness – Indian Context – Part 2
This is part 2 of the series. Read “Part 1” for the context. Problem #2: Scrum Masters are not empowered to make decisions The problem statement is that the Scrum …
Scrum Master Effectiveness – Indian Context – Part 1
Recently I facilitated a meet-up through our local user group, Agile Hyderabad. We had about 60 people attended from 24 different organizations. The group identified top 3 reasons to why …
An Estimation Experiment
Estimating work (stories) probably is the hardest part in software development. Every team I have seen seemed to struggle with it. Lately, there is lot of talk about #NoEstimates. I …
Do you write your stories right?
By now, I hope most of the people who practice agile knows what a user story is. I observed in lot of teams that either they don’t write user stories …
Game – Test small, test often
This is a game to demonstrate Testing small and Testing often is more affective. Take any building blocks. I used Jenga wooden blocks. I chose 36 Jenga blocks and numbered …
Test First Development is like driving a car with GPS
I had this funny thought that what if you have a GPS that tells you that you made a wrong turn only after you made a turn (I know no …
Try first.. then test
Testers who are new to agile software development often struggle to find a way to test the code in smaller pieces. This is mainly because they are trained to test …
Make Your Tele-team Work
Here is the article I co-authored with Lisa Crispin. http://www.stickyminds.com/BetterSoftware/magazine.asp?fn=cifea
Do you understand your “Velocity”?
Velocity is a metric that is used in agile projects to represent how fast a team is building the software. Velocity is number of story points (or what ever the …
True Collaboration!
Last week we had an issue in production. One of the reports was hitting the servers pretty hard. Our “Production support monkey” (all developers rotate this job every sprint) mentioned …
Self-Organization makes ‘Agile teams’ more agile!
We talk about self-organization is one of the most important aspect of agile teams. But what is self-organization and how does that happen? Is it easy or hard to self-organize? …
What should you do in “Technical Debt” sprint anyway?
Now that you convinced your product owner to allow you to have technical debt sprint, what should you do in those anyways? Let us get into product owner’s shoes and …
What could we learn from Cricket?
I mean, Cricket – the game that is played in most of the major countries of the world. We had our “Agile Hyderabad” group meeting yesterday. We spent most of …
Why agile teams need “Technical Debt” sprints?
Lot of people asked me why do they need “Technical Debt” sprints. In my experience lot of product owners don’t see value in these sprints. I would like to make …
