My TechNoVoice

Almost all IT companies have moved or are moving to Agile\Lean development. Do you know that Agile was first proposed and used in manufacturing industry. Interesting right? Can we ever think of a good's manufacturing company has anything to do with Agile? What would an incremental development mean to the manufacturing world because a good to be delivered has to be delivered completely. We cannot think of a car gets delivered without interior because product owner decided so. Or a wall clock gets delivered without hour hand. Then where is the relation between Agile and manufacturing industry? Being software industry people, we are thinking or can think of above funny cases, however for manufacturing industry, Agile is not about for e.g. a ready to ship product after every Sprint in Scrum. But Agile for them is to be able to respond quickly to customer needs and market changes while still controlling costs and quality. How is that possible, well that's the magic. And apart fr...

What Is It After All? Like any other estimation techniques, story points estimates are also about time i.e. the time efforts involved in doing something(a story). Everyone likes certainty and predictability and hence want to know when something will be done\delivered. When estimating, we need to consider all  the factors which directly or indirectly influence the efforts involved. C omplexity  is the base factor although other factors like  risk ,  uncertainty  etc. also adds to time efforts.  Each of these factors can affect in one or more phases of delivering a story. For example: A story may be  simple  to implement however  complex  to test or vice-versa Uncertainty  for example comes in during integration testing where your team's work gets integrated into say other teams work. Both teams are confident about their deliveries, however, that anxiousness creeps in, will it work flawlessly? Will we have some rework to do? E...

The Proxy Product Owner A proxy product owner is a person acting as a  place holder  for the actual product owner . I have found proxy product owners used to compensate for overworked, partial, and distant product owners. In an organization, the vice president of product management was asked to take on the product owner role for a business-critical product. Even though he was ideally suited for the job, he struggled to spend enough time with the team. The business analyst on the team consequently stood in as a proxy product owner when the real product owner could not be there. The proxy did most of the product owner work without being empowered. The actual product owner ultimately decided about product backlog prioritization, release planning, and whether to accept or reject work results. What followed was an increase in conflicts and miscommunication, a slowdown in decision making, and a decrease in productivity and morale. Using a proxy product owner is an atte...