Better Software: Setting Up the Development Environment

This is first, in series of posts on how to write Better Software. The series would try to touch upon stories which would result in development of better software.

This post is about having a minimalistic development environment setup to do effective software development. As you can see in the picture we need 5 entities to begin with.

Role of an Agile Architect in Chinese!

A few weeks back I was contacted by Bryan Zheng. Bryan is a part-time editor of Agile Community of InfoQ China and his full-time job is working as the senior editor of Programmer Magazine which is a publication of CSDN.net. CSDN is the world’s largest Chinese-speaking online IT community with 2.6 million registered members. Programmer Magazine is the only and most popular software development magazine in China.

Bryan wanted to translate a couple of my articles to Chinese for the IT community thriving in China. First translation was for the article “Role of an Agile Architect”.  The English version of the article has already been published on Agile Journal and is also present on this blog site. You can download the Chinese translation which has been published in the Programmer Magazine.

Thanks to Bryan for sending me the pdf.

First Agile Workshop at Ghaziabad

Ghaziabad, quoted amongst the top ten most dynamic cities, got its first brush with Agile when a full day workshop was conducted at the Raj Kumar Goel Institute of Technology on May 03′ 2008.

It was amazing to see the interest in the academic community to introduce Agile in their way of working. It was a second such conference that I attended after the Agile Goa 2007. There were representations from nearly 30 colleges, well mixed with people from the industry. We are told by the college authorities that there were 150+ registrations for the event with 125 people attending the conference.

Do All Members in an Agile Team Get Equal Rewards

In Agile all team members are equal. We ideally have a cross functional team. All team members are regarded as equal and everybody has an equal right to voice their opinions. There is no code ownership. Nobody is finger pointed at etc etc etc

Ah, so much equality that you start feeling that everyone should be paid an equal amount of Salary too. Well … naah!

It seems that the equality ends here. If it does not just imagine that you have just delivered a pretty successful Agile project. The client is happy and so is the team. You decide to reward the hard work of the team. You decide to distribute Bonus. WHAT????? …Bonus.

Instead you might just want to shoot yourself in the leg. Surprised, read on …

Does a Good Agile Process Guarantee a Successful Project?

Recently there was a discussion on the Scrum Development user group debating the relationship between Agile process and the outcome of the project.

 

Most of the people seemed to agree that a good process is required to succeed however placing too much importance on just the process alone does not work.

 

Does implementing a good agile process ensure project success?

 

Difference between “Done” and “Shippable”

There has been a lot of discussion on various agile forums and blogs about the difference between ‘Done’ and ‘Shippable’. It might sound like both mean the same, however discussions on the lists and various blogs suggest that these are still widely misunderstood, mis-used terms. Here is a roundup of recommendations about how to handle “Done.”

Read rest of this round up on my news post on InfoQ.

So your Agile adoption failed! Ever heard of Shu-Ha-Ri?

This story would interest you if you are new to Agile and are planning to adopt it with full enthusiasm.

Xlabs started Agile adoption with the full fanfare. It had the upper management support and the team was convinced about its values and the results it could bring to the table. Four iterations down, Xlabs started feeling that things were not working out as well as they expected them to be. They tried for a few iterations more with even more disappointing results. Finally they came to the conclusion that Agile was overrated and worked only for a few organizations. Let down by the results they moved back to what they had been doing for ages, waterfall. The management however was reading about the agile development success stories around the world and decided to do a root cause of what went wrong.

Within a week the process auditing folks came out with the basic flaw with the way Agile was adopted. Xlabs had no idea about Shu-Ha-Ri! and hence they adopted agile in the incorrect way thus leading the current state of affairs.

So what is Shu-Ha-Ri and why is it so important?

Role of an Agile Architect

This post is a reproduction of my article which has been published on Agile Journal by the name The Shiny New Agile Architect. You can download the pdf here.

Recently there has been a lot of talk on whether we need an Architect on agile teams or not. There have been never-ending discussions on various forums both inside organizations and out in the public questioning the value that an architect can bring to the agile project where the architecture evolves with every iteration. This has led many traditional Architects to scramble for cover and opened gates for a new breed of architect, the Agile Architect. The traditional ivory tower Architects are gradually proving to be the weakest link in the chain for agile projects. The bulk of the traditional Architect’s responsibilities are now split amongst the agile team, thus leaving them without a lot of work that they were previously doing. The Agile Architects are emerging in line with Charles Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest.” The role of an Agile Architect on the team is unquestionable and many agile teams vouch for the fact that he is one of the most valuable members of any agile software development team.
So who is an Agile Architect? How do you identify if the Architect on your team is an Agile Architect?

Do you follow Agile? You are fired!

The post that follows is based on a real life conversation that I had with a friend of mine, who works for a big Systems Integrator. His company, like all other companies today, has the buzz word “Agile” spread all over their website, but the ground reality is different, in fact very different. It shows the huge Gap which is present between what is said about Agile and how it is understood at these so called big companies.

They have scores if not hundreds of projects going along at the same time. Some of the teams follow agile in the real sense and others do not.

What follows is the hard reality that agile teams have to eventually face in an organization that is either new to Agile or embraces agile only for marketing material.

NCR Agile Users Group (NAUG) Knowledge Evening

Yesterday we had a the second NAUG knowledge evening conference at a superb venue arranged by Dr. A.K. Yadav @ Ansal Institute of Technology.

We had a session on Extreme programming which I presented and another one by Rama Krishna(RK) on his experiences with Tech Mahindra on their adoption path of Extreme Programming and Agile. It was very enlightening to hear about the XP adoption story with the hurdles that were faced and what was done to overcome them.

I was really impressed by the way in which some companies are serious about XP and the way they have adopted it to the core. As always there was deep discussion on the merits and demerits of pair programming. Rama Krishna vouched by the fact that Pair programming has given them heavy benefits and he used the statement that in their team when people are pairing 1+1 <> 2 but 1+1 = 11. I personally cannot agree more.