Saturday, June 14, 2008
Part I: Daily Standup Meeting
- Sharing Commitment
- Communicating daily status, progress, and plans to the team and any observers
- Identifying obstacles so that the team can take steps to remove them.
- Setting the direction and the focus
- Building the team
The underlying theme of self-organization of team. The main purpose of stand-up meeting is to share the commitment towards their project and the team. This takes precedence over communicating status. The team leads, in general have a sense of progress. In the daily stand-up meeting the team member publicly shares his commitment. Identifying the problem so that the team takes steps to remove them is very important. Doing this helps the team to continue the momentum of progress. The meeting facilitates the setting of direction and focus of the team. Otherwise the team members may move in a different direction which might reduce the momentum of the overall progress. Finally but not the least, these meetings are medium to build team. These meetings build effective communication facilitator which is essential for building self-organized team.
An effective Stand-up meeting will energise the team for the days work, hence increasing productivity. At the same time, a low energy meeting can adversely affect the team’s productivity. The daily stand-up should help cultivate a sense of belonging to the team. The team members should sense his team is supportive and should be comfortable sharing the obstacle.
The Daily stand-up meeting should be attended by everyone who is directly/in-directly related to the project. This reduces the duplicate reporting effort. However, the people not directly linked with project might disrupt the meeting. In case a team member cant attend the meeting in person, he should find some way to attend the meeting by proxy (through the telephone, meeting summary sent by email etc.) The team members are not able to attend the meeting regularly, typically signals the meeting is not held at right place and/or right time.
The Daily Stand-up meeting should focus on the three questions:
1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. What obstacles are impeding my progress?
Labels: Agile, Scrum, Team Building
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Encouraging amicable disagreement.
Alistair Cockburn in his book “Agile Software development” defines amicability as:
“Amicability is the willingness of people to hear the thoughts of another person
with good will and to speak without malice.”
Lets consider a scenario of hierarchical team organization (which typically has top-down chain of command) where a senior programmer is paired with programmer. The programmer might tend to agree with the senior programmer (cause can be various) even when he can provide constructive suggestions. This will surely degrade the quality of deliverables.
The constructive amicable disagreement should be encouraged in an organization for better performance of the team. Sometimes it can be useful to induce amicable disagreement in the team so that the team can share their views. Or the culture of constructive critical feedback should be encouraged in the project team.
Labels: Agile, Team Building
Friday, May 02, 2008
Some thoughts on Staffing an Agile Project
1. Individuals and interactions
2. Working software
3. Customer Collaboration
4. Responding to change
Creating a good Agile team is essential for the success of an Agile project. The team should follow the above values religiously as they will enforce harmony in the team. The values of derived from agile manifesto can be micro-analyzed on following factors:
1. Humanity: The team members should acknowledge human weaknesses, leverage human strengths, and balance individual and team needs.
2. Economics: The team should strive together to increase the value of the product they are working on without forgetting the time value for money.
3. Mutual benefit: All the decisions and actions should be aimed to benefit every one (the agile team and the client).
4. Self-similarity: When the team finds a thing works well in one context the team should try to use the same experience in another context as well.
5. Improvement: The team members should always strive to improve.
6. Reflection: The team should reflect how and why they are working.
7. Flow: The team should deliver a steady business value by engaging in all activities
8. Opportunity: The team should take the problem as an opportunity for change and learning and not as trouble or show-stopper.
9. Failure: If the team has trouble succeeding, they should not be scared to fail.
10. Quality: The team should involve themselves to always push themselves for higher quality.
11. Baby steps: The team should understand the importance of incremental growth.
12. Accepted responsibility: Theoretically speaking, no task is assigned to the individuals in an agile team. The team members should be proactive and should accept responsibilities.
An agile project team staffing is crucial for smooth execution of the Agile Project. The team members should exhibit the above values even when they do not have experience of working in an Agile environment.
1. Forming: This is the stage when members knows each other and makes friends. This is the stage where we can see how each member works as individual and responds to pressure.
2. Storming: Though this stage is necessary for growth of them but leads to low motivation and could be destructive. This stage is unpleasant and even painful if the individual is averse to conflict. The tolerance of each individual is different.
3. Norming: This is the stage when team members adjust their behavior to each others as they develop work habit that makes teamwork seem more natural. Team members do this by agreeing to a set of rules, values, professional behavior, shared methods, working tools and even taboos. This is the stage when the team member start trusting each other and the motivation starts increasing.
4. Performing: Some teams will reach performing stage. At this stage the will start working as a team without conflicts and without external supervision and hence setup a high performance team. The team has become interdependent and is highly motivated.
5. Adjourning: This stage involves completing the task and breaking up the team.
Agile Methodology suggest to build team which has people from different backgrounds (different culture, geographical location etc) as they have different thinking patterns. If we talk about personality, different personality type contributes to a successful team. At the same time, the behavior of people with same personality might differ but it forms a base of behavior people feel comfortable with. Awareness of behavior and personality type can help create a favorable team mix.
The agile team should exhibit following behaviors:
1. Willingness and ability to learn
2. Willingness and ability to mentor the team
3. Willingness and ability to be tolerant and patient.
4. Willingness to work in team.
5. Exchanging suggestions amicably.
The success of staffing Agile project by minimizing the time to reach Performing stage. The personality type defines:
1. Motivation: How energy flows in an individual?
2. Information processing capabilities: How an individual takes information?
3. Decision making capabilities: How an individual makes decision?
4. Lifestyle: What kind of lifestyle an individual prefers?
Some methods to analyzing personality type:
1. DISC assessment: DISC is the four quadrant behavioural model based on the work of William Moulton Marston Ph.D. (1893 - 1947) to examine the behaviour of individuals in their environment or within a specific situation. DISC looks at behavioural styles and behavioural preferences
2. Enneagram of personality: Don Riso has defined the Enneagram as "a geometric figure that delineates the nine basic personality types of human nature and their complex interrelationships." While the Enneagram suggests that there are nine basic personality types of human nature, there are, of course, many subtypes and variations within the nine fundamental categories. Nevertheless, the assertion of Enneagram theory is that these nine adequately map out the territory of "personality types." (More information: http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/)
3. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality questionnaire designed to identify certain psychological differences according to the typological theories of Carl Gustav Jung. The typology model originated by Jung (and further developed by Briggs and Myers) regards personality type as similar to left or right handedness: individuals are either born with, or develop, certain preferred ways of thinking and acting
The norming stage is critical as it’s the stage where the working style, roles, expectations are set.
Finding out the personality type:
The personality type of the candidates can be found out by face to face behavioural interview. The personality types can also be gauged by assigning the team with a team task.
Agile advocates a team with appropriate mix of people of different personality types as people of different personality has different thinking pattern. We know that the basic behavior and personality type of the people can not be changed. It would be advisable to filter out the extreme introverted personality while staffing an agile project. The agile project needs self-motivated, highly energized extroverted individuals. Knowledge of individual’s personality type can help a lot. An appropriate mix will help the project to reach norming and performing stage early.
Final thoughts:
1. Access technical skill of candidates.
2. Shortlist candidates based on their technical skill.
3. Assign the team of selected candidates with a fun activity to access their behaviour.
4. Assign the team with a simulated task and observe how each member behaves in the team.
5. Collect the feedback about the activities.
6. Final selection (based on the project requirements)
Thursday, April 17, 2008
A point of View about Agile
An excellent mentor is quintessential for each agile team. He should be responsible for creating a good team dynamic. Agile team is a relatively experienced team and under circumstances the team could be a gang of excepts if cost is not a concern for the client. Managing ego of such a team could serious trouble. Starting an agile development project with relatively inexperienced team is not at all advisable. So a favourable mix of team will be required and the senior members of the team should be ready to play good mentors. Each less experienced member should be mentored by a senior and experienced team member. This has an inherent advantage. The learning curve of new team member will be better and in long run the team is expected to be very productive. One needs to be very careful while selecting the team. It’s advised to understand the psychological profile of the team member before inducting him/her in the team. Some people prefer to work alone. So the individuals work style should be respected.
Organization’s participation is very much necessary for going agile. The organization should strive to satisfy the individual as happy individuals are productive individuals. The organization should give more stress on recognizing team success over individual’s success (but not overriding individual’s success). The issues like promotions and recognitions should be dealt very cautiously.
These were the few concerns. Now let’s look at the brighter side of the agile world. Agile provides a good ROI to the client. The client is closely involved in the development process so the goof-ups could be avoided. The maximum loss could be of one iteration and the client can revisit their decisions. The requirement changes are welcomed at logical points. For the team members, it’s a high learning curve. Organizations get a change to develop good collaborative development model to suite both their style. The organizations develop good mentors and that’s a bonus.
Word of caution: It’s recommended that the agile development/management should be adopted in phases observing how the team reacts to the changes, especially when the team does not have exposure to agile. Never force Agile on customer or the team if they are not ready. Tailor agility depending on the needs of project and not for adopting Agile practices.
Labels: Agile, Project Management, Scrum, Software Development, XP
Friday, February 08, 2008
The Wheel of Life
The bar is raised every day. The child inside me demands more. He is never satisfied and longing to expand his horizon.
I am back after a l0ng gap and hope my life will give chance to keep my blog going without intermittent gaps.
Labels: Accenture, Java, Life, Senior Programmer, Software Engineer
Thursday, December 22, 2005
A fine day
I often wondered what is there in Chennai.. Last day I went to Satyam (A ciniplex situated near
Deception Point by Dan Brown
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Its Saturday
I read Digital Fortress by Dan Brown and Chetan Bhagat's One Night @ Call center.
Friday, December 02, 2005
Ek akela is sahar me.....
Chennai gave me a warm welcome with cool morning (it was really different as compared to my last experiance, Whenever i recall chennai it reminds me of the hot and humid climate).
Today its raining outside and I am stuck in my office.Tryin to kill time.... God please stop this rain... please....
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
So I hope to continue with my SKR World... Planning to make this space little more organized.
Google Talk (Tech 'n' Tweek)
I find Google amazing. Google has its different way to do things. I jus loved the concept of gtalk, gmail, Google Personalized Home , Google Earth and .... Read More
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
A day in Chennai
We, I along with a friend of mine, left for Chennai from
I had heard about the cell phones banned in the campuses but not about the other thing. I thought he must have been joking. Finally we were in the campus of the college after two security checks. I was surprised to know that the SMS was 200% correct. If any male student is found talking to his female friend he is fined heavily. You are not allowed to communicate with your female friend even if she is your classmate. The first thought that came in my mind was “DISG
After the meeting we hired an auto for Alwarpet for 150 INR. This was not at all an easy task. There was a lot of bargain involved. He came down from 210 INR to 150 INR. I still think if I gave him more than what he deserved or what. The appointment was favorable by God’s blessing.
From there we got an auto to
This was the end of day in Chennai. We had to board our train to
