The Agile School

We hear all the good things about agile and scrum.  With all these trainings a gradual mindset change happens. Recently a friend of mine asked why I am so passionate about scrum and what is the change I observe in myself because of this over the years. The certification training (and other scrum trainings) I received were a major eye opener for me. One of the key changes was the accountability aspect.  Previously team members were accountable to the work they do, work assignments was happening directly from Project manager. They usually don’t worry about the other areas in project. The change from my work to team work was wonderful. Many times Product Owner is tempted to assign work directly but since I knew the dangers of this allocation I can oppose it strongly. This helped the team to decide and assign work themselves. Now whenever I hear “my work” or “my bug” I used to have crucial conversations with team and direct them towards “our work” philosophy.  We shifted our focus fr

Personally I feel that all in the team should understand all the stories which are going into the sprint. As soon as one task is finished he/she should take the next task in the backlog rather working on the “pet” or “my” areas. I usually hire developers who are willing to test also. If someone cannot understand the work done by the team even after repeated training then it is the job of HR and other functional managers to weed out such people. Testers are intelligent people.  It doesn’t helps if they are doing monkey testing of application or writing long test cases which even they don’t refer. IMHO they should be the business domain experts. They should provide value to the customers and business with their domain knowledge. Many times I have seen testers asking the developers about the requirements.  They limit their testing to the knowledge acquired in such a way. More than just ensuring that the features developed is bug free the team should strive for excellence by providin