ShriKant Vashishtha

When You Infer from Customer – "I Don't Know What I Want"

ShriKant Vashishtha · May 9, 2011 · 1 Comment

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.

"Missing Roles in Scrum" and "Holistic Success of the Software Projects"

ShriKant Vashishtha · May 3, 2011 · 6 Comments

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.

Has Agile Become Another Waterfall?

ShriKant Vashishtha · February 18, 2011 · 2 Comments

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.

Agile Testing – Incremental Functional Test Approach

ShriKant Vashishtha · November 3, 2010 · 8 Comments

Software development is all about incremental functional development.

However we find a great impedance mismatch between development and testing synchronization. Though we talk about continuous integration and verification, most of the user stories come for verification only at the end of sprint which pose a major challenge in front of the testers just because of mismatch between the time available and amount of work to test.

To this point, developers may argue that they cannot give unfinished feature to the testers as they broke their work (user-story) according to technical subtasks. So for a developer Controller class has been written but Service still needs to be written. So tester may not be able test the technical tasks. Tester is more interested towards functional part completion instead of unit tests. This results in a impedance mismatch between developers and testers.

Efficacy of Automated Acceptance Testing: Some Practical Facts

ShriKant Vashishtha · May 10, 2010 · Leave a Comment

These days there is good amount of debate on the efficacy of the automated acceptance tests. Many have started believing that current way of acceptance testing is a waste as it doesn’t provide you the relevant ROI as you’d expect from it. People have provided some alternatives also, but to me they look very subjective where you’ll always prompt with – “it depends”. In this post, I am not going to talk about yet another alternative of automated acceptance testing, but rather will put some practical facts based on our project experience that worked for us.
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