Agile Experience & Improvements made

Agile Experience & Improvements made 

·           Worked with multiple Agile Methodologies (Scrum/XP/Kanban/FDD), Project/Delivery Management & Incremental Delivery and Backlog Tracking, Burndown Metrics, Velocity, Epics/Themes, Burndown Techniques, Numerous Retrospective Formats.

·           Well experienced in playing the role of a Scrum Master / Agile Coach for Distributed Agile Teams across geographic locations.

·           Facilitate all aspects of the Scrum framework, including Sprint Planning Sessions, Estimations, Backlog Grooming Sessions, Daily Scrums, Sprint Reviews and Sprint Retrospectives, Maintain the Scrum Team Demand-Capacity Plan, Release & Iteration Planning & Story Point/Ideal Days Estimation, Scrum Board, Sprint Backlog and Burn Down Charts & Agile Kanban Boards

Describe a time when you’re agile/scrum process stopped working effectively.  How did you work through it?

There were times when team were following Agile-Scrum practices running projects with multiple geographical locations. However the practice followed were not as effective. Few of the week areas and solutions identified/applied are as below.

1.     No Planning at Portfolio/Program level

2.     No Release Planning, resulting less clarity in Project-Roadmap

A.   Introduce planning at each Onion Level

3.     Iteration Planning is by activity rather than feature

4.     Features Are Not Developed By Priority.

A.   Feature based Prioritization rather tasks

B.   Introduced MMF concept

C.   Introduced MoSCoW concept

5.     User Stories were not groomed properly

6.     Splitting User-Stories were not appropriate.

A.   Introduce INVEST attributes & detailed Acceptance criteria’s at User Story Level.

B.   Introduced Split Practices to Sprint User Stories like (Split across data boundaries, operation boundaries, meeting priorities separately, across security & performance concerns etc.)

C.   Introduced Three-Amigo approach for improvement in scope definition and improved estimations.

7.     Stand-up meetings becoming progress updates and less structured

A.   Limited Stand-Up meetings to standard Scrum questions, limited chicken’s contribution, removed extended design/technical discussions in Scrum meetings.

8.     Less effective estimations and later blame-games

9.     Less consistent Estimations methodology/unit/scale across teams

A.   Introduced Cross team & Cross-functional behavior in estimation to come-up with one estimates as team estimate rather individual.

B.   Point Based Estimation (Planning Poker/Delphi) and it’s consistency across teams introduced Velocity improvements across team.

10.   Less clarity in work-flow

11.   Re-work and bottlenecks observed, resulting in death-march and poor delivery qualities.

A.   Introduced Kanban approach to of know how their current software development process is working end-to-end, and to identity where wasteful activity is occurring below improvements:

B.   Increased view in Organizing, Optimizing & Tracking

C.   Increased visibility of issues & bottlenecks

D.   Facilitates continuous Improvement

E.   Reduce waste & cost associated with changes

12.   No/Less effective Test-Driven Development

13.   No/Less Automation of Test Cases

A.   Introduced Test Driven Development

B.   Introduced writing US is form of Given-When-Then, adding value to test case automation with Cucumber.

14.   Sprint Reviews with business resulting in more & more findings (No definition of done-done)

15.   Less improvement in Velocity

A.   Introduced Feature based development, Interim demos to business & Definition of Done, resulted in less review comments and increased deliveries acceptability’s.

16.   Less structure deployments (No Train Release Concept)

A.   Introduced Train Release Calendar concept, helped Business & IT Teams to know their delivery schedules and avoid adhoc or chaos in releases. 

17.   Un-structured Retrospectives.

18.   Retrospective Action Items not tracked/taken forward as User Stories

A.    Introduced multiple Retrospective techniques (Setting Stage, Like Mad/Sad/Glad, Five Whys, Short Subjects etc) in five different steps resulted in lot of interest and value in retro-sessions.

Regards,
Arun Manglick