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According to a 2018 US Chamber of Commerce report, 84% of the small businesses use at least one digital platform to promote their business, while 79% use digital tools to engage with customers and suppliers.
Today, the estimated annual global digital ad spending stands at a staggering $332.84 billion. Closer to home, Americans purchased a whopping $586.92 billion worth of products and services online.
In just over a decade, we’ve witnessed how agile software development began as a grassroots movement to eventually progress and become a mainstream methodology. Agile’s approach aims to change the software development process by inviting organizations to invest in a philosophy that would ideally increase productivity and ROI, and meet business goals — all while creating better environments for IT teams and individuals.
Agile Fluency® Project Consultant and Co-Founder James Shore shares the concept of energized work, the evolution of team rooms, applying agile methodology by looking at complexity in large-scale enterprises, and advises on how organizations can invest in agility.
Developers who tried to build at least one product for an end-user know how many things are essential in a product: thoughtful UX, friendly UI, good performance and stability, security and data consistency, logging and maintenance, etc.
Multiply this to the number of platforms that you have to support. Add marketings and licensing, client support and bug reports, new feature requests, and competitive product pressure.
It’s hard to track everything in one head, and it is even harder to be perfect at every job. That’s why we work in teams. That’s why we use project management processes.
When asked by the editor of the online science and technology magazine Edge.org to share one brilliant but overlooked concept or idea that he believes everyone should know, the Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler, father of behavioural economics, former president of the American Economic Association and an intellectual giant of our time, did not hesitate. “The Pre-mortem!”, he said.
The idea of the pre-mortem is deceptively simple: before a major decision is made or a large project or initiative is undertaken, those involved in the effort get together to engage in what might seem like an oddly counterintuitive activity: imagining that they’re at some time in the future where the decision/project/initiative has been implemented and the results were a catastrophic failure, then writing a brief history of that failure - we failed, what could possibly be the reason?
Feature teams often employ the concept of Planning Poker (or Scrum Poker) to help estimate the effort required to complete a given user story. Each team member is provided a set of cards, which are used to provide their estimate for the level of effort required for a given story. Most teams employ decks that utilize a Fibonacci-like sequence of the following values: 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100.
Experienced scrum masters make teams aware that an eight-point story should be able to be broken into a three-point and five-point story. As a result, stories are typically not worthwhile to estimate as anything greater than a value of eight.
DevOps, CI/CD, and Agile are all methodologies and approaches that have gained attention in recent years in the QA and testing fields.
They have emerged with the need to make testing leaner and to enable businesses to deliver quality at speed.
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a process of automating Business Operations processes using software robots, wherein the processes being automated are repetitive in nature and are based on rules. RPA projects are slowly adopting Scrum Methodology for its benefits.
The length of an RPA project can vary anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months, sometimes beyond that as well. Due to this varied duration of projects, we often think RPA projects cannot be benefitted by adopting an Agile Scrum methodology. But in basic nature, RPA projects are like complex web-development projects.
Agile project management started life as a methodology for software development. It put forth the idea that interacting with staff and clients is more important than processes and tools. Agile project management also prioritizes collaboration over contract negotiation; and being adaptive is better than blindly following a plan.
Which just makes sense. And you can see why this approach has been taken from the world of software development and implemented across a variety of fields.
In their book Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis, authors Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman introduced a simple and powerful model to guide product discovery effort – The 7 Product Dimensions model. This model identifies 7 areas (product dimensions) that we will need to explore – through collaborative questioning and reflection – in order to learn more about the product. The dimensions are User (who the users are), Interface (how they interact with the product), Actions (what they can do), Data (what data the product needs/stores in order to work), Control (rules & constraints), Environment (platforms that would host the product/on which value will be delivered), and Quality Attribute (customer’s expectations around quality, usability, etc.). The premise is simple: if we ask good, powerful questions about each of these dimensions, we’ll learn a great deal about this product we want to build, which will help us build a better product. You can find more information about the 7 Product Dimensions framework and canvas Here[1]
Here are some of the questions that we could ask to discover more about each product dimension:
One of the most important roles in an Agile Project is that of the Product Owner (PO). The Primary responsibility of the PO is to represent the Business, prioritizing business requirements for delivery. This often means that the PO is the one who decides what the Squad does in a Sprint. However, it does not mean that the PO tells them how to do it, when to do it during the sprint, and which team member should do what. Sadly some POs go beyond their key responsibility and start managing the team and the project – the Project Managing PO! These POs find it difficult to move away from Project Management and adopt an approach of trust, collaboration, and empowerment – which is pivotal in an Agile context.
This article highlights the PO anti-patterns, describes the repercussions of these, and towards the end suggests a few tips to avoid them.
Large scale change initiatives (Lean, Agile, etc.) have a worryingly high failure rate. A chief reason for which is that serious risks are not identified early. One way to create the safety needed for everyone to speak openly about the risks they see is by running a pre-mortem workshop. Pre-mortems leverage a psychological technique called ‘prospective hindsight’ – imagining that the transformation had already failed, and walking backward from there to investigate what led to the failure.
When asked by the editor of the online science and technology magazine Edge.org to share one brilliant but overlooked concept or idea that he believes everyone should know, the Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler, father of behavioral economics, former president of the American Economic Association, and an intellectual giant of our time did not hesitate. “The Pre-mortem!”[1], he said.
In the ever-evolving tech industry, innovation is the pinnacle for success. Innovation need not be caged to technology; rather the approach for developing technology also needs innovation, hence Agile Methodology. It helps organizations to co-create, converse, and collaborate, which enhances performance, reliability, flexibility, and speed.
The question arises, what it truly means to go Agile? Co-ordination, rapidity, and flexibility are the foundations for Agile. In this evolving technological world, adapting to Agile will transform your business. It will bring transparency and bring the inter-team conversation to the front. The organizations can develop software in the form of increments that are not just faster and efficient but can adapt to the modifications needed by the clients, thereby being transparent to the stakeholders. In Agile methodology, team management and productivity will support the framework of incremental or iterative progress of work priority. The most widely used Agile processes are SCRUM, XP, DSDM, etc. These frameworks are the origin of Agile and are based on adapting to change, which will, in turn, help in achieving success for a project.
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable" - Dwight D. Eisenhower
There is always a fear when embracing Agile that things will fall into chaos and that planning and strategy go out the window. I have been on projects that have run into these types of issues, and a big part of that stemmed from the team losing sight of the big picture goals and direction for the project. One thing that has been very helpful in preventing chaos and keeping things on track has been: release planning.
When the release of a Netflix true-crime documentary coincides with a worldwide pandemic (COVID-19), the chances a miniseries has the chance to gain momentum is much higher. When the storyline centers around exotic animals and some not-so-normal personalities, the ratings will sour even higher. This very thing happened for the Tiger King, which is currently considered one of Netflix's most successful releases to date — bringing in over 34 million viewers during the first 10 days of the March 20, 2020 release.
For those who are not familiar with Tiger King, the series focuses on a guy named Joe Exotic (not his birth name, of course) and his zoo which contains mostly tigers. Joe has an interesting personality, unique lifestyle and a goal to be known as the "Tiger King" among not only his interconnected society of conservationists ... but to the entire world.
Last week, we addressed basic practices and tools of remote agile with distributed teams. Based on that article, I also ran a live virtual class, the recording of which will be made available soon on the Age-of-Product’s Youtube channel. This follow-up post now delves into virtual Liberating Structures, answering the question of how we can make use of the powerful toolbox of inclusive and collaborative practices in a remote setting.
Created by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, Liberating Structures cover a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team — even as a (very) large team by Scrum standards, overcoming traditional communications approaches like presentations, managed discussions, or another disorganized brainstorming at which the loudest participants tend to prevail.
In November 2015, I had a conversation with a guy named Allen Coin (@Allen_Coin), which turned into a major milestone in my career as an Information Technology professional. Allen was the first to give me an empty and broad canvas to express my thoughts and opinions to an amazing audience of technology enthusiasts and professionals. On November 10, 2015, my first article "Into the Development Time Machine" was published on DZone.com.
At the time, I thought my article did quite well, reaching nearly 3,000 page views. It was far more than I had ever generated in my blog -> johnjvester.wordpress.com
Since 2014, I have been involved with several projects with a goal to convert an existing application to utilize a microservice equipped with a RESTful API. In every case, the desire was to allow a client to make RESTful API calls (as needed) to the microservice for retrieval, persistence and other data processing needs.
I fully believe I am not the only one who has ventured down this course. In fact, in a personal adventure, I did the very same thing for my mother-in-law as documented in my "New Application Journey" series.
Agile has always been about colocation, about direct communication, physical boards, and all the other haptic and analog moments to create value in the digital realm. As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I strive to provide training classes without using PowerPoint or digital devices. Moreover, admittedly, I love index cards. However, times are changing. So, let’s dive into the particularities of practicing remote Agile with distributed teams.
We start with basic techniques and tools and follow up with how to apply Liberating Structures in the remote realm.