Common Road Blocks to Being Agile

Why is adopting Agile sometimes difficult? Many companies have had a lot of success implementing Agile, but many are still going through the transition

One of the most positive outcome of Agile is ,It promotes teamwork, gives the Scrum members frequent positive feedback, as well as sense of being involved in important decisions and having control over the Application.

 Here is the list of factors that can freeze transition to Agile.

Ø No team - Without the Scrum team, there is no Agile. The team comes together for a definite period of time, it consists of people who know each other, are comfortable with each other.Random groups of individuals, resources provided through shared services,multiple billings and partial allocations just won’t do. The management should carefully consider each team structure, size, as well as roles and personalities, and give the team time to form and norm.

Ø Isolated teams - An ideal Scrum team is co-located. Sadly that’s not always possible. Having team members in different geographical locations and time zones can definitely reduce the team’s ability to collaborate. If the team cannot be co-located, technology can help getting the scrum members closer together. Video conferencing, screen sharing, instant messaging are simple ways to establish trust and promote communication.

Ø Workload - Too much or too little work can impact the team's ability to establish its pace and start performing. Expecting the team to work on multiple projects in parallel and constantly switch gears can be confusing. Companies deeply involved in Waterfall are used to quickly scale the resources up and down to answer the needs of each individual project, but in Agile the planning should revolve around the existing teams.

Ø Product Owner Involvement – It is not enough to reorganize the Dev teams to adopt Agile. The  Product Owner have to be deeply rooted as well. They need be ready to build roadmaps and draft backlogs keeping current happenings in mind. Assign the Product Owner role to one of the team members. It can be a Business Analyst or an engineer (developer or tester) who will be in touch with the Product Manager when he or she is available and communicate the requirements to the rest of the team.

Ø Unplanned Branching technique – Do multiple teams submit code changes to the same branch? Are hotfixes and releases shipped out of the same branch? Do developers check in code that didn’t pass the build or unit test? Each of these factors might become a showstopper and prevent the Scrum team from delivering a meaningful incremental slice of functionality at the end of the sprint.

Ø Cumbersome deployment procedure to QA environments –Deployment to QA environment may require time and effort, regardless of whether it's a client-server or cloud based solution. The hand-off between developers and testers should be an easy hassle-free process.

Depending on technical process, there might be a need to submit tickets, engage deployment teams or DBAs,setup new environments, as well as refresh. These activities put the sprint deliverable at risk.

Ø  Regression testing – A long manual testing cycle at the end of the release is typical for complex large scale legacy systems. One remedy is continuous integration and Automation testing. If that’s not available, Scrum teams can deliver small chunks of completed functionality at the end of each sprint through the patch and have a “hardening” sprint (or number of sprints) at the end of the release to perform a full-blown regression testing.

Story of Loyalty

There were about 70 scientists working on a very hectic project and were really frustrated due to the pressure of work and the demands of their boss but everyone was loyal to him and did not think of quitting their job. One day, one scientist came to his boss and told him, “Sir, I have promised my children that I will take them to the exhibition in our township so I want to leave the office at 5:30 pm.” His boss replied positively. The Scientist started working and continued his work after lunch. As usual, he got involved to such an extent that he looked at his watch only when he felt he was close to completion. The time was 8.30 PM. Suddenly he remembered the promise he had made to his children. Deep within himself, he was feeling guilty for having disappointed his children. Reaching home he found that children were not there and his wife alone was sitting in the hall and reading magazines. His wife asked him, “Would you like to have coffee or shall I straight away serve dinner if you are hungry?” The man replied, “If you would like to have coffee, I too will have but what about the children?” His wife replied, “You don’t know? Your boss came here at 5.15 PM and has taken the children to the exhibition.” What had really happened was … The boss who granted him permission was observing him working seriously at 5.00 PM. He thought to himself, this person will not leave the work, but if he has promised his children they should enjoy the visit to exhibition. So he took the lead in taking them to exhibition. The boss does not have to do it every time. But once it is done, loyalty is established. That is why all the scientists at Thumba continued to work under their boss even though the stress was tremendous. By the way, can you hazard a guess as to who the boss was? He was none other than the mastermind behind India ‘s successful nuclear weapons and missiles program. "Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam", Former President of India !

HINDI

No wonder we are stepping up towards the league of being a developed country but we arelacking something that prompted me to post few lines. It’s about our national language "hindi".Surprisingly but the fact is that once again we are heading towards the black hole. Directly or indirectly somewhere down the line even we too are held responsible for this fall.
Now i won't start from the core areas. It is surprising to see how much parents now-a-days talk to their kids in English and how little in the national language. Whenever I go to some restaurant, park etc and if there is a family with their kids, all I can hear is young kids talking to each other in English. Their parents may talk in hindi but whenever they talk to kids, it would be in English. the reason is simple they want to make their kids go according to the present demand ,they are pushing their kids a head start into the language their kids will use in their professional life but wont they have enough time to learn that in school ?
With upcoming IT sectors, BPO's ,the demand of english has grown up exponentially . But if you look countries like Japan, china and most of the European countries, you will get to know it is because of their national language usage in every field led them to be in the list of the developed countries. The impact is that it brings out the extra energy to boost up and do well. We only know how to do things in extremes, the best way to implement is to keep a balance of all the tiers.