Dear editors ... Or what news in February?

A little bit about Agile and the office

Recently, I passed Agile Development with Scrum training and a 2-day workshop (you can’t call it training - 50% of the time of this training is working with live documents and generating artifacts to get information about a project) to collect requirements in Agile - REQ-Agile Requirements Analysis .

It was quite interesting. The first training took place almost in the form of a round table. For 4 hours, we discussed Agile - what it is, why the approach recommends certain practices. They came to the fact that there is no special magic in this and this is common sense in organizing the work of projects.

One of the participants spoke pleasantly about this training. :

“I was at the training with Nikita Filipov - Agile injection into the brain. Strongly recommended to all who type "we use agile in your project." To understand that all these extremely diverse perversions that quite well exist in real life have nothing to do with either agile or scrum. And also the fact that agile does not solve the problems of the fact that for example a team is not sufficiently motivated or there are contradictions within a team. Scrum is a good way to build an effective team of good (= medium) programmers in a quite observable time. If you want (but itching), or already “use”, but something sucks it turns out - go to training so as not to waste time punching the walls with your head . Firstly, it’s far from everyone and not always this recipe helps, and secondly, maybe you just “don’t know how to cook them properly” ”- thanks for such an emotional review :)

Another important event, personally for me, was that we did this training in our new office on Gazetny Lane. Now we have our own small training room and an office where my colleagues, Irina and Askhat, are doing things for the benefit of ScrumTrek and the companies we are helping to become the best on the Russian market :). Therefore, we are waiting for all our friends and acquaintances to visit us.

Requirements Management

The second and third day passed in the atmosphere of the “working group” - for two days with eight product owners and project managers we discussed the life cycle of requirements collection in the Agile process. There were a lot of discussions, of course, some of them did not deal with the requirements directly, but had a process character, but we did not avoid them. The whole training consisted of several activities:

• Theory
• Discussion of life cases that help identify the causes of ineffective product management.
• Practical tools and exercises developed by the industry, as well as personal experience with companies in this area.

The first day was focused on the principles and problems associated with the collection of requirements and the construction of the product as a whole, from the point of view of the managers of the project or product managers.
The second day was organized as a continuous simulation of the life cycle from concept to planning and rescheduling releases.
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It was pleasant that managers from the Russian segments faced the training: Product development in the Russian market and Outsourcing development with western customers. Interesting discussions ensued , and the experience of Roma Yufereva (Avicode) was no less useful for many than the cases from my practice.

After the training, Roman wrote me a letter with his farewell review:

Among the problems that are most often faced by professionals working in the field of software development, we can distinguish two of the most significant areas: Process Problems and Product Problems. And often (at least in my practice) the main focus of efforts is directed towards the creation / improvement of the process. Especially in outsource projects, where sometimes you can observe the “Cinderella phenomenon”: the process is a favorite daughter, and the product and its problems worry only the “good fairy” - Product Owner. Being in the role of this “good fairy” at the moment in 2 outsourcing and one internal projects, I clearly realized that one of the key problems in my case is the issue of collecting, analyzing and orderly work with requirements. The training of “Agile Requirement Analysis” by Nikita Filippov has already helped me (although it has only been a week) to streamline and restructure the process of working with requirements on two projects. Not all the “gaps” have been filled, but problems are clearly visible, their influence on the development process is clear, and measures are identified to address these problems. Such training, in my opinion, is extremely useful, as it covers the area of ​​problems in which Scrum itself does not provide us with anything. At the training, we were able to study (recall) a set of practices and tools that can be used in virtually any iterative development process: Drafting Vision, defining goals and limitations of a project, defining user roles, etc. So whatever process you have (maybe even WTF, ... excuse the waterfall) - this training will most likely be useful.

These are the news for the last February :)

See you in March

• Conferences on Agile and AgileDays in the framework of RIT
• Company plans for the next half year
• New interesting trainings and articles on software development management and IT companies using Lean and Agile
• What else can improve development?