Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
What is technical debt?
In this episode of Cocktails, we explore the definition and talk about how technical debt is anchored on our own thought processes, and how software architecture has evolved along with our development philosophies. We also dig into some great stories, analogies, and advice on how we can deal with and clean up our own technical debt.
Software engineering is one of the most talked-about and sought-after career paths in the current world.
During my journey as a software engineer, I have worked with some wonderful people, the latest technologies, and great projects. As I reflect on my humble beginnings and the gradual progression to my current role as an engineering manager, I wish I knew some key aspects of the craft of software engineering back then.
Maturity models are based on consistent, systematic, linear-scale assessments and representations of existing software delivery processes that are applied through standardized methods of evaluation. This enables maturity quantification of methods, ways of working, and applications of technology in the software delivery processes.
Maturity models are arguably good for organizations that seek consistent, measurable improvement. In those organizations, different areas of software development can be assessed and rated (e.g., defect management process maturity, test data management process maturity, etc.), and subsequently benchmarked against a standard or industry average.
In this highly engaging talk at the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Jimmy Janlén addresses the core element of “Agile,” its key to speed, innovation, and success: team autonomy. Learn more about its benefits, challenges, fears, and pains and what organizations can do to unleash it.
Modern organizations are convinced that autonomous empowered teams are one of the core concepts of Agile and key to speed, innovation, and success.
A few years ago, when companies started embracing Agile, they would bring in a consultancy firm to help come up with a strategy for the shift. They would hire some Scrum Masters, provide basic training to their teams, and proudly declare: “We are Agile now.”
But that statement couldn’t be further from the truth. More than a methodology, Agile is a philosophy, and adopting it means that everyone involved should get on board with a complete and profound transformation. A transformation that, oftentimes, fails.
There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Since Scrum is an intentionally incomplete framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. For example, what if the stakeholders (who bring the budget that is funding your Scrum team) insist on calling the shots by overruling the Product Owner’s prerogative to define the composition and the ordering the Product Backlog? What if your stakeholders suffer from the “my budget, my feature” syndrome?
Join me and delve into the effects of overruling the Product Owner in less than 140 seconds.
This week we have another episode from the 2021 engineering leadership conference INTERACT. In this live conversation I interview Henrik Gütle, GM of Azure for Microsoft Canada.
Henrik joins the podcast to break down the results and key takeaways of Microsoft’s research into the impact of remote work on developer velocity - and what engineering leaders can learn from it.
Despite decades-long efforts of the whole agile community—books, blogs, conferences, webinars, videos, meetups, you name it—we are still confronted in many supposedly agile organizations with output-metric driven reporting systems. At the heart of these reporting systems, stuck in the industrial age when the management believed it needed to protect the organization from slacking workers, there is typically a performance metric: velocity.
In the hands of an experienced team, velocity might be useful as a team-internal metric. But, when combined with some managers’ wrong interpretation of commitment, it becomes a tool of oppression. So when did it all go so wrong?
There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Since Scrum is an intentionally incomplete framework with a reasonable yet short "manual," this effect should not surprise anyone. For example, how do we communicate with members of the Scrum team that take the Scrum Guide literally? What about a dogmatic Scrum Master?
Join me and delve into the effects of Scrum dogmatism in less than 120 seconds.
In this highly engaging speaker session from the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Viktor Cessan shares lessons learned as an Agile coach when working with systems, resulting in evidence-based interventions.
When we, as managers or coaches, are asked to work with a system, there’s always more to a situation than meets the eye. In this presentation, I take you through common requests I’ve gotten as an Agile coach, and I contrast the initial request and understanding with what we discovered was actually going on, and what we did. I also share some tips for anyone working with systems in their day-to-day work.
Often a scrum team decides to implement a feature in a sprint, codes it and sends it to testing. At this stage, the product owner, scrum master, and the team often get a false impression that the feature is almost done and what remains is just testing and releasing it to production. Right?Wrong! Experience has shown that this only the start. The battle is only half won and there are many hurdles to get that feature to the finish line.
Our scrum team went through several sprints where we thought we were ready to release a feature to production but “something” came up towards the end of the sprint and we failed to deliver. We slowly came up with this checklist to ensure that what we had was checked all boxes before we showed the green flag to our product manager.
The project management process is a complex maze of tasks, sub-tasks, and core dependencies.
There are a lot of different elements and substances associated with it that make it as unpredictable as it is.
Johari window as a concept comes from the study done by psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) in 1955 and is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise.
In today’s turbulent and rapidly changing business environment, Lean-Agile working models have helped businesses become more adaptive and flexible. With a focus on creating highly engaged and empowered teams who act on fast feedback and pivot regularly to maximize business value, it’s easy to understand Agile’s present popularity.
Yet while the “Agile” concept is good in theory, it can become overly-idealistic. Many organizations commence their transformation journey with the best intentions only to find their workforces soon shift back into a production line driven by uniformity. This is the critical point where progress can begin to stall.
Agile is one of the most popular approaches to project management because of its flexibility. It is an incremental and iterative approach to project management that helps teams handle their workload more efficiently.
The agile manifesto started in 2001 as a way to address software development issues faced by software developers. Today, agile is a popular project management approach preferred by many project managers for their teams, regardless of the industry.
It's hard to find anyone, on an individual or corporate level, who wasn't affected by the events of 2020.
A global pandemic? Check.
I have about ~16y 04m of Software Development Experience (2021) and have been working on Agile Projects since about 2006. My First Formal Introduction to Agile was through a Training by Thoughtworkers (Thoughtworks is a Leading Agile Company). This was while I was a Senior Software Engineer at Huawei, Bangalore, India. I have worked on Agile/TDD/Pair Programming (Various Variants) in multiple companies including Huawei, Symantec, Yahoo, Finastra*, Oracle*, OpenText*. Recently and Once Again, I attended a Formal Classroom Training (Company Internal) on Agile. I jotted down the most important points and now am presenting them in this Blog. I hope it helps and becomes a Ready Reckoner for Understanding/Learning the Agile Basics (Needs, Motivations, Practice, and Story of Evolution).
* [Original Product Firms were Acquired by these Current Companies]
Minimalism is an extremely cool invention of the 20th century and is soon becoming the favorite strategy of millennials to use in everything.
Regardless of whether digital minimalism is adapted in personal or professional life, it has been known to reap some amazing results. Of course, a boost in productivity and focus come as guaranteed perks to it.
