DEV Community: Ganesh Pilli ☻

How leaders can mess with Agile

Ganesh Pilli ☻ — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 10:23:23 +0000

I have witnessed companies collapse or see great setbacks by implementing agile incorrectly. So I know some pitfalls.

I have seen people say "take a sprint and complete the project" I kind of feel that guy was "Judge, jury, and executioner" for the team :-).

Hi, my name is Ganesh, and I am here to talk about Agile for leadership teams.

If your company is planning to move away from the waterfall kind of framework and adopt SCRUM Framework/Agile Philosophies please be cautious there are a lot of pitfalls.

Below are some pitfalls I was talking about:

Buy tools and Hire SCRUM talent, in a month or so we will be agile
Let's not touch the org structure
I don't need to change
My client/stakeholders don't need to know
Agile is going to save me money

Let me explain how these ideas are going to fail you.

Buy tools and Hire SCRUM talent - Let's be Agile

This thinking is not correct, SCRUM is not some tool or training. SCRUM is a practice, it is a cult. Tools and training are essential but that's not all, Agile change is a continuous process to change the mindset of associates, workflows, delivery model, and technology stacks so its a reinvention but again all this can happen over a course in agile, that's what agile is one goal at a time.

Let's not touch the org structure

Agile works best in a flat structured organization. This means few or no levels of middle management between staff and customers/stakeholders. This increases the responsibility of a scrum team and improves coordination and communication. So re-alignment of the organization is really important.

I don't need to change

As leaders, your expectations or goals are the organization's goals which means you are the first person to start thinking the agile way. The promises or agreements to the clients or stakeholders should come from teams working on the project. So you will become responsible for the teams and teams will become responsible for delivery.

My client/stakeholders don't need to know

No, they should know, that Agile changes the delivery model from all at once to one thing at a time, this means everybody's expectations should be aligned to the agile delivery model.

Agile is going to save me money

No, Agile is a value-focused framework, financial befit will be a by-product of the value-focused delivery. The product or customer is the center of the agile journey, the customer or products might demand a lot of changes to the scope or estimates. So if your focus is not product or customer you better stay away from agile.

Thanks for reading please do comment on what other pitfalls/misunderstandings you saw?

Please do follow so I can send more awesome articles.

What is SCRUM?

Ganesh Pilli ☻ — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 06:22:44 +0000

Hi My name is Ganesh and I am here to talk about SCRUM, Scrum is a heavily used framework in the software development industry today.

Let us learn about SCRUM by answering a few questions like what is scrum, and why we need to use scrum. Before we begin let us understand the problem SCRUM solving.

The problem

The Waterfall framework was a widely used framework before SCRUM. This methodology dictates that software development should happen in multiple stages like defining scope, development, testing, and maintenance. These stages are nonlinear which means so very little scope for continuous improvement. It also had many challenges around scope, timelines, and communication. These things take time so by the time product is released your customers might find alternatives, or your competitor beats you to the market.

Waterfall challenges

Solution: SCRUM in a nutshell
Scrum helps to overcome these challenges by dictating an iterative model of delivery. which means you will slice your entire project into meaningful pieces that can work independently or together, then pick some feature/key element built and ship it to the customer in an iterative manner. Each iteration can be 2 to 4 weeks in duration. After each delivery, you will have feedback to add to your backlog, Next pick the next set for the next iteration. Repeat this until all the features are delivered.

This way you could reach your customers quickly with the minimum or key features. This way you will have better and more accurate insights from the actual users and that will l help you build the complete project with clarity. Of course, this process will disrupt many things like cost, plan, and estimates but It is better to fail fast than fail big right?
Know that we are familiar with SCRUM let us take a close look at SCRUM. SCRUM is simply a guide with roles, rules, and routines in it. At least I look at the scrum that way.

Video:

What are SCRUM Roles?

A typical scrum consists of 3 roles with a size of 3 to 9 members, the roles are SCRUM Master, Product Owner, and Developers. SCRUM Master acts as a coach to the team, he facilitates, helps, and educates the team to work towards the goal and deliver. he will work towards eliminating any potential blocker for the team. Product Owners acts as captain he will help the team with the plan, prioritize, and provides directions to the team. Developers are the ones who build the software, test, and deliver.

Rules

As we discussed earlier. When the SCRUM team picks a set of items to develop and deliver and start then the iteration is constant. This means no shrinking/pausing or postponing.
Time-box each of the meetings, never fail to attend meetings and each iteration should produce the shippable software.

Routines

SCRUM has a few mandatory routines, One of them is the Sprint planning meeting, in this meeting all the team members together plan the work and decide the goal they want to achieve at the end of the iteration or sprint and then start the sprint.
During the sprint days, every day all the team members quickly meet for 15 minutes and talk about their progress and talk about any blocker, this way all the team members know the exact state of the sprint on any given day this meeting is called Daily SCRUM.

During the spring team spends time in backlog refinement meetings that will focus on creating work items for future sprints by dividing the features.

Once the sprint is finished and the goal is achieved there could things went well or went sideways, so the team will again come together and discuss the things that happened during the sprint, this exercise will result in action items to follow in the future sprint so the team gets better by each iteration.

We have discussed a lot of SCRUM items it’s time we put them together in an official SCRUM workflow diagram.

Thanks for reading please do comment or share the article!

Simple Design System(Buttons) - 01

Ganesh Pilli ☻ — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 12:09:52 +0000

What is a Design System?

A design system is simply a group of elements that are most commonly used by developers, this will help them consistency and good user experience while developing UI.

What is this article about?

This is the first post of the series that I want to create, I picked the button component to start with.

Tech Needed

Install VS Code https://code.visualstudio.com/
Install Live Server Plugin https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ritwickdey.LiveServer
Install Live SASS compiler https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ritwickdey.live-sass