Thursday, 18 September 2014

How does Scrum help in clearing Technical debt and improve Employee satisfaction in the organization?

Unlike a large amount of certifications such as ITIL certification, Prince2 certification and PMP certification, which are used for successful implementation of Best Practices or procedures for ensuring perfect design or output of a product or service, Scrum training also emphasizes on the satisfaction of employees and reduction in Technical Debt.
Technical debt is considered as a difficult challenge as considered by the older techniques of project management. This is because development of a particular product or service, testing and proper documentation will be done in sequences and at various times by different persons – in short, a single person would not be responsible for any specific Working Deliverables. The output will be that technical debt gets accumulated, in the long run, that will lead to high maintenance costs, integration and costs in release of products during the last stages of a product’s release. In other words, these cost changes are very high in these types of circumstances and problems rise in final stages of the project. Scrum certification framework averts these issues that are related to technical debt. This will be done  to ensure that Done deliverables with Acceptance criteria will be defined as one of the parts of Sprint Backlog that include key tasks involving development, testing and documentation. But this will be done as part of the same Sprint and will be carried out by the same Scrum certified or Team which will be responsible for the project.
Consistent pace throughout the project is considered as one of the main advantages of Scrum certification. A regular pace will lead to improvement of employee satisfaction, conducive environment and high level of accuracy in estimation. For development of a high quality product and for maintaining an environment, it is important that integration-type activities are carried out regularly than specify delays of the integration work till the last stage in similar type of circumstances. In order to deliver value at regular intervals, the Scrum certified team should constantly involve in development, testing and integration of the functionalities of every Prioritized Product Backlog Item (PBI) in each Sprint with the use of techniques, such as constant integration and automated testing of products. One of the major principles of Scrum certification projects is that it emphasizes on ensuring that the effort involved in the current Sprint should be similar to the future Sprints in order to maintain the consistency. This will help the team for avoiding phases of large amounts of work in a single phase as they will always have the knowledge of the levels of work that are required to complete the work in given amount of time.

 To know more click on:  http://www.scrumstudy.com/blog/

Thursday, 4 September 2014

Agile Testing: When is it considered done?

Coding and testing stages are not isolated ones but well integrated ones in Agile development. The development toward every user story commences through written business-interfacing experiments that enables the team the ‘what part’ regarding coding and also the juncture when the tasks are being completed with. Professionals in the field of testing, analysis and development interface with stakeholders from the business side for extracting instances of preferred and unwanted manners for every single user story and aspect, and then transforming them into tests which are executable. This is known as Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) or Specification by Example. The team which is responsible for development will then work in partnership with their customers to choose the specific user story aligning customer expectations apropos the delivery part. User stories will be corroborated upon cracking the different functional, automated functional and manual probing tests.
Time is an important element which should be made inclusive for the whole activities related with testing toward user story estimates. This can include automated testing and manual probing testing. Inexperienced Scrum teams frequently and habitually over promise or goes overboard with their commitment part in terms of extra work planning compared to what they could feasibly do. Testing then gets hard-pressed in the end in the absence of features, due to this undesirable characteristic of the team simply because of the arrival of sprint on the last day. The result – mass demise of user stories hauled from one iteration to the subsequent one without the testing professionals being able to conduct their tests.
Focusing on completing each story at a specified time is a good way to handle this problem.
Necessary role inclusion for comprehending the various customer requirements and delivering good quality oriented software is a benefit that Agile teams possess inherently. Agile teams find the much needed opportunity through their varied experiences and assortment of abilities which help them in traversing different approaches toward supporting business participants in outlining their requirements. They are able to do it through tangible examples provided to the stakeholders and then interpreting the same into experiments certifying the ‘done part’ aimed at every user story along with their features.
Customers are pleased with the outcome pertaining to as an effort of the team – interacting and coordinating with the business teams, taking out the much needed time to plan for evidencing the aspects are done with as per requirements outlined. Newer Agile teams must pool in time to search for different means to comprehend the requisites of customers so that they can interpret those requisites into well conducted experiments which will outline software development. That will bring in maturity in terms of experience and doing things in a speedy manner efficiently and effectively.