Agile/Scrum for onshore/offshore hybrid model – Part I
1. What are the various methods to following Agile programming?
a. Extreme Programming
b. Scrum
c. DSDM
d. FDD
e. Crystal Clear
2. What is the fundamental difference between Traditional Waterfall model vs. Agile?
a. Water fall is plan driven while Agile is value driven.
b. Agile works best with a fixed team taking uncertainty as an acceptable model and does not try to estimate too far into the future.
c. Traditional waterfall works best when long terms risks need to be understood upfront.
3. Is there something like a hybrid mode which takes the best from Waterfall and Agile?
a. Officially there is nothing published, but lot of companies continue to plan a long term plan using traditional planning with smaller projects and features implemented through an agile/scrum approach.
4. What are the core tenants of Scrum?
a. Co-location
b. Scrum values: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect and Courage.
5. Do you wonder who invented Scrum?
a. Credit has been given to Jeff Sutherland, and Ken Schwaber first used during 1993
b. Also mentioned credits go to Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikojuri Nonaka since “Harvard Business Review in Jan 1986.
6. What are the two types of backlogs we refer to ?
a. Product Backlog – Prioritized, fairly well documented features
b. Sprint Backlog – Product backlog items assigned to a sprint. It is noteworthy to mention that tasks are action details that stem from a backlog item within a sprint.
7. What are the 3 roles in Scrum?
a. Product Owner
b. Scrum Master
c. Delivery Team
8. What is velocity?
a. If you are a physics buff, you might think “velocity is the rate of change of displacement”. Sticking to Scrum, velocity measures how many function points worth of development can a scrum team process per sprint.
9. How do we write a simple use case?
a. The best way to write a use case is to concentrate on the business use case, without any technology affiliations. Example: As a buyer I would like to search for a item based on manufacturers model number, from selected set of manufacturers, so I can find specific items I am interested in to consider buying those.
b. It is useful to add other items to this use case like various acceptance criteria: Example: The system should provide the results within 1 sec, and search arguments and search results should be provided in the same screen.
10. What is story points?
a. Story points is the estimation exercise where the team estimates how big the feature is from a complexity perspective. It is important to note that story points are relative. So a team could potentially estimate higher or lower points for a given story. It is an evolving exercise that is expected to get better as we progress through sprints.
11. What is Planning Poker?
a. Planning Poker is a known technique where the scrum team estimates each story, sometimes iteratively till they agree to the complexity. The purpose is also to challenge and clear assumptions about a given feature.
12. What is abnormal Sprint Termination?
a. A abnormal termination generally signifies inefficient or lack of Sprint Planning sessions. Sprint can be abnormally terminated based on several factors like:
i. Team unable to meet the goal due to outside circumstances
ii. Management cancelled the sprint due to business reasons outside the team.
13. How do we track progress?
a. Tracking typically uses “Burn Down” charts which is a direct graph of features outstanding vs. time available.
14. How can velocity help us?
a. Velocity metrics from past sprints can help the team identify if a given feature can be finished within a standard sprint.
15. What is Sprint retrospective?
a. It is a meeting of the delivery team members including the Scrum master, ideally without the Product owner. The team discuses things that went wrong, that could be improved, make product backlog items, and inspection of processes.
16. Where does Automate Build stand in Agile Scrum model ?
a. Automated Build or Continuous Integration is a recommended model so ensure that code is compiled on a regular basis. This supports shorter development cycles typically followed with Scrum.
17. What does Automated Testing mean?
a. Automated Testing goes hand in hand with Continuous Integration model to ensure that code gets tested automatically as part of automated build. Product teams go to the extreme of running full blown stress tests for every build to ensure the release can stand up.
18. What do we mean by Agile Refactoring?
a. Refactoring is the process of clarifying and simplifying the design of existing code, without changing its behavior. One of the results of Agile methodology is it causes some amount of rework from an architecture standpoint and brings up refactoring of code tied to the same or similar features. If left unaddressed it causes “code rot”. It is very important to clean up through every sprint to ensure code is refactored.
19. Do traditional project managers have a role ?
a. Absolutely yes – Interestingly the basic art of managing a project is still very important and a experienced project manager who understands scrum (delegating into becoming a servant master) is definitely very valuable to a project
Follow the next blog at Agile/Scrum for onshore/offshore hybrid model – Part II