Tag Archives: Agile

Project Management, Technology

Spring – the way to look forward

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Lets first look at the need for Spring in this agile world. The never-ending meetings. The schedule overruns. The sudden problems. In the midst of all that, you might feel taking into account the project fade away date will never come.

Sooner or then, though, it arrives  regardless of whether you’approaching ready for it!

You have no substitute but to accomplish through each and every part of one one the tasks, issues and problems when the project. But don’t make available them save you snowed in. Keep an eye out for spring. Be ready for the hot weather forward it arrives.

An Added Wardrobe

When spring is knocking, it’s era to obtain a added wardrobe. The unventilated coats and the mittens and the caps can be packed away for taking into account-door-door year. It’s era for shorts, t-shirts and hats that shade you from the sun. Spring is the time for option vivaciousness. A new wardrobe helps everyone realise that it’s era to throw off the accompaniments of winter. It’s period to build happening your wings anew in the sun.

When it comes to a project, perhaps you quirk to put on into a season subsequent to less stressful meetings. Maybe you mannerism more tasks that lessening directly to the finish pedigree. Everything in the office begins to regulate as soon as the project gets stuffy to the be credited gone less. Everything. You can begin to see the fruits of the team’s labours.

Looking Outside

Now that you have one more wardrobe, it’s period to venture uncovered. The cool days are gone. The rain is anti out. It’s time to be outside enjoying the sun and flowers even though they bloom.

On a project, as you stuffy the cease of a phase or the grow less of the complete project, you can begin to reclaim your lunch hour and your social networking. Get out and enjoy the fact that your moving picture is no longer consumed along with updating schedules. That revising deliverable isn’t keeping you awake at night.

Enjoy the natural crack brought upon by the add less of the project or the project phase. Of course, if the project is giving out late or in make miserable, you may compulsion to double the length of upon the piece of legislation back you can really enjoy the springtime. Consider that epoch a long winter. But save in mind that the spring will come sooner or complex no event what else happens.

Celebrating

Most of each and every one one, bearing in mind spring is in parable to (symbolically or on the other hand), it’s time to celebrate. Break out some satisfying food. Fire happening the grill outside. Invite neighbours and family. Open going on the pool or the backyard. Spring is a reminder that cartoon thrives — no matter how long or cold the winter is.

This might just be a easy profit together more than donuts in the office. Whatever it is, there should be some available of break from the daily scrape the length of to recognize the achievements and breakthroughs the project team has practiced.

After every, what permissible is the hot weather if you don’t believe the era to enjoy it? Will you be ready?

Project Management

Agile Feedback Loops – Catalyst of Effective Agile Product Development

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Agile Software Development – Feedback loops are very critical to the effectiveness of Agile development processes. Feedback loops provide opportunities for product and process improvements. In other terms they act as catalyst for effective agile product development.

One of the key differences between conventional projects and agile projects is that agile projects have shorter and frequent feedback loops.

Idea here is to change something in the process, see how it went on, learn from it and then adapt the improvement. To do this on a continual basis to ensure the best and continuous improvement is achieved.

To do this XP uses techniques such as Pair Programming, Unit Tests, Continuous Integration whereas as Scrum advocates using Daily Scrums, Sprints etc.

One of the following generic feedback technique can be used by the agile team for building high quality Agile Product:

  1. Capture feedback received from Customer / User community in terms of inputs / review comments / business requirements
  2. Product Manager/ Owner grooms the feedback and prioritize the feedback as part of the re-prioritized backlog
  3. Development Team develops and deliver as per the prioritized feedback
  4. Product Manager/ Owner reviews the developed feature (relevant to the feedback)
  5. The developed feature is then validated by the customer / user community
  6. On satisfactory validation the product feature is finalized. If there are review comments / improvement feedback then steps 1-5 are repeated.

In Agile projects based on the project phase, following techniques / practices are used:

  • Code Reviews to validate the code written
  • Automated Integration tests – essential for continuous integration
  • Automated Acceptance Tests – essential for continuous integration
  • Involvement of customer representative, business experts, end user representative throughout the project development process
    Increasing the number of releases
  • These techniques helps in having shorter feedback loops through frequent verification and validation. This in turn help immensely in effective and rich product development.

Project Management

Agile Retrospectives and Project Postmortems – Are they different?

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Project Retrospectives give the project team to review what was done correctly and what was done incorrectly in the project execution. In traditional project management, project retrospectives (also known as Postmortems) are conducted at the end of the project which is too late to help. As against this Agile Retrospectives are carried out at the end of each iteration. Hence the agile retrospectives are iterative and incremental. This helps the team to inspect and adapt in-between and quite often.

Broad Activities carried out in Agile retrospectives:

  • Reviewing work carried out in the last iteration
  • Discussing and outlining the personal and team issues
  • Discussing what worked well during the iteration
  • Finalizing and agreeing on what needs to be changed (Improvement strategies)
  • Finalizing the plan for implementing the changes
  • Agile retrospectives are done at the end of each iteration
  • It gives team the opportunities to inspect and adapt iteratively and incrementally
  • This helps in team find and fix the problems in time and effectively.
  • This helps in continuous improvement and short feedback loops.

Just to reiterate and summarize, the difference between Agile Retrospectives and Postmortems is as given below:

  • Postmortems usually occur at end of the project (or even dead), when it’s too late to plan and implement any improvement on that project.
  • Agile retrospectives occur at the end of iteration.
    Postmortems are generally long feedback loops.
  • Retrospectives are done once per project.
  • Agile Retrospective occur at the end of every iteration and hence are short feedback loops.
  • Postmortems sometimes turn into blame game.
  • Agile retrospectives are carried out iteratively. This ensures the issues are not allowed to be blown out. They are controlled and the project performance is improved. As a result of this the blame game is avoided.

Project Management

PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) – Great way to demostrate your Agility

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Project Management Institute (PMI)’s Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) credential helps the agile project management professionals to demonstrate to their employers that they have the required level of professionalism and activism in Agile Practices of project management.

PMI-ACP

While Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and Scrum Certified Professional (SCP) certifications cover Scrum Methodology in Agile, ACP covers principles, practices and tools and techniques across agile methodologies that include Scrum, kanban, XP, lean, DSDM, TDD, ATDD and more.

Various tasks executed by the Agile project practitioners during the course of project execution are categorized into six major domains of practice as per ACP certification course. These domains are:

  •  Value Driven Delivery: Domain I
  • Stakeholder Engagement: Domain II
  • Boosting Team Performance Practices: Domain III
  • Adaptive Planning: Domain IV
  • Problem Detection and Resolution: Domain V
  • Continuous Improvement (Product, Process, People): Domain VI

Experience Required:
. ACP requires 2000 hrs Project Experience, 1500 hrs Agile . Experience (non-overlapping) and 21 hrs Agile Training.

Training Requirement:
It also requires agile training for 21 hours. These 21 hours are equivalent of 21 PDUs.

Certification Cycle:
ACP credential holder must maintain Credential in 3 year cycles. ACP credential holder needs to earn 30 PDUs in agile project management per three-year cycle.

Exam Fess:
. Member Computer based: $335
. Non-Member computer based: $435
. Member paper based: $270
. Non-Member paper based: $370

So guys get certified in PMI-ACP soon.

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