Agile

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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Knowledge Sharing Between Distributed Teams

ShriKant Vashishtha · June 2, 2009 · Leave a Comment

One of the key USPs of pair-programming is – it provides value which is more than simple typing. That includes ACTIVE participation in code-review, knowledge sharing on continual basis, frequent design discussions with minimal distractions etc. If you primarily focus on knowledge sharing, pair-programming essentially provides true form of knowledge sharing as instead of looking at some bulky heartless documents you sit together with a person who has already worked on the subject and can have conversations and design discussions.

Augmented Distributed Agile Teams – The Need of Local Retrospective

ShriKant Vashishtha · May 21, 2009 · 1 Comment

World is becoming a global village especially in form of communication and the dissemination of information. In context of current economic turmoil and lack of enough trained software professionals locally, distributed Agile is becoming a norm for software project execution.

Earlier, most of the times, entire distributed software project used to be executed completely at offshore because of time-zone differences and communication issues. Now because of communication revolution, you see a new trend where software companies like to extend their teams (augmented Agile teams) with different vendors. Recently while working in such a project from a distributed location, we realized the need of local retrospective.