Posted on
June 22nd, 2011
Yesterday I had a conversations with one of my colleagues Prakash who works as a tester in an Agile project.
“So how is it going on?”, I asked.
Prakash took a deep breath and said, “Umm...workwise I think I am getting more confident on the application functionality now. However in one of our retrospectives I realized that I have to improve on some of my personal traits.”
“Interesting ! - and what are those?”, I asked.
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Posted on
May 11th, 2011
Nobody can question if you implement the Agile practices in Waterfall projects. If you talk about XP practices in general, they are not really specific about any methodology. Pair-programming, CI, TDD etc all make sense in any methodology. However one of the key difference is – Waterfall doesn’t bound you in anything. It also doesn’t say that the least engineering or project execution practices are these or those or that one except defining 4 phases of the methodology. So in my experience of 10 years with Waterfall some people used to adopt some good practices and some others didn’t. It used to be person dependent case how a Project Manager would like to execute a project.
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Posted on
May 9th, 2011
As per our experience while working with Waterfall and Agile, upfront design doesn’t necessarily work and in all practical cases it’s rather evolved design which we need to target for. However the same may not hold true for project architecture. Though you’d like to change some of the implementation pointers in process, you'll not think on changing the structure itself completely.
It's a costly affair and may prompt you to rebuild the building from the scratch again. Sometimes this is the destiny of some failed software projects. And many a times, the root cause is - at the beginning of project, customer himself was not clear what he really wanted.
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Posted on
May 3rd, 2011
Recently I had a discussion with one of my colleagues over the definition of Agile Architect role. Scrum doesn't have any room for such role. The whole idea behind that is - just by labeling a person with a role named Architect, the person doesn't become Architect. Also architecture creation should be a collaborative effort instead of defined by just single person. That's why by definition, any/all developers can contribute to shape the architecture of the application depending on their competency.
So the question is - why am I still talking about it? The answer lies in some scenarios I encountered while executing Scrum based projects where I felt the need of having a person with certain responsibilities and competency. In this blog, I am not just talking about the need of Agile Architects but also about some other roles which become very important for holistic success point of view.
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Posted on
February 18th, 2011
These days there is a lot of talk around the relevance of Agile principles in today's context. Some people talk about new Agile Menifesto which might make sense today and some even have termed it yet another waterfall already.
To analyse this, first of all it's important to understand what Agile really means from pragmatic point of view. To me, two things came out prominently which you can sugarcoat with many books, presentation, theories etc. However I think that is the crux of being agile:
- Inspect and adapt continuously
- Agile is nothing but pure common sense.
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