Regional Scrum Gathering India 2014

Friday 11 July 2014 – Saturday 12 July 2014, Hyderabad (India)

Book of Abstracts

Keynotes

The Power of Relationships

MS. GIRI, Niloofer

Relating is an art, a skill, a talent….
Our whole lives are spent relating to objects, beings and circumstances.

There are various unseen laws and principles that govern our relationships.

Knowing these laws means that we don’t unknowingly injure ourselves or others while relating.
On the other hand, one could make use of one’s knowledge of the laws to build strength and power, dependability and trust, sustainability and independence in relationships.

Ignorance of the laws of relating is no excuse for being free from the consequences of violating the laws…

Most relating is often impulsive, based on likes or dislikes, based on inner pressures, or family, peer and society pressures.
Based on ignorance, we find relating based on fear or anxiety, excitement or monotony.

A capacity given to us to help enrich life…needs to be understood well, if we wish to align ourselves with the power that is inherent in relationships.

WANTED: Agile Coach, ScrumMaster, Janitor, whatever…Making enterprise Agile transformations successful

Mr. GULLO, Daniel James, SolutionsIQ

The term “coach” has become an overloaded and almost meaningless term in much the same way that “agile” has. Many individuals are calling themselves coaches who have little or no practical experience with Agile in large enterprise organizations.

Organizations are confused about who they really need to bring success to their Agile transformation, and thus, are advertising for the wrong skills.

In this session, we will talk about the distinction between the various roles in a successful Agile transformation and what characteristics accompany those responsibilities.

Digital Apps Development at the Speed of Thought – Confluence of Agile & DevOps

Mr. RAO, V. Srinivasa (VSR), BT & BT

To align with digital enterprises, there is a greater need to develop 100s of Digital Apps

• Digital Apps are built with the convergence of Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and other technologies
• Few of the examples of Digital Apps are MobileSocial Apps, SocialAnalytics Apps, MobileSocialAnalytics Apps, MobileAnalytics Apps
• Unlike Applications, which are built for 100s of features, usually Apps are built for 1- 2 features
• Digital Apps to be built-in hours, days and weeks to adjust with the pace of changing customer needs/ expectations
• Conventional Application development methods do not support this speed of development and deployment
• Hence the confluence of Agile and DevOps methods to be leveraged for speedy development and deployment

Scrum Lessons from Service Organizations

Mr. PATIL, Rajesh, Capgemini

Track: Organizational Behaviors and Transformation Techniques (OTT)

Nurturing Organizational Transformation into Scrum Practices

Mr. VAIDYA, Kirti

This paper will present an approach to Organizational Transformation into Scrum Practices. The approach was developed by the author while working with organizations in the USA and Australia over many years.

The audience will learn about the governance, management, techniques, and tools to use within such transformations and treat them as humane organizational change management.

The Problem:

Today organizations are looking for better ways to develop software. They want software development to become more efficient, and more relevant to business. Scrum practices enable organizations achieve this.

Whole Team Ownership makes software development more efficient through collective human smartness, and Product Ownership makes it more relevant through Business-IT Collaboration. It is easier to foster Scrum and other agile practices in individual projects, as compared to adopting them across organizations, due to resistance to change. Unless such organizational transformations are appropriately nurtured, they fail to “stick”.

Background:

We conducted a year-long workshop across major consulting and end user organizations to collate the lessons learned in process implementation. When the recommendations were applied to Scrum implementations, they revealed a very interesting difference: whereas organizational implementation of non-Scrum SDLC was about learning variations on existing practices, the implementation of Scrum SDLC has been about unlearning many existing practices and habits and then learning Scrum practices and habits. The approach presented in this paper achieves this by treating the transformation as humane organizational change management.

Approach:

The approach focuses on an iterative Organizational Transformation into Scrum Practices by establishing a program which implements a few specific practices at a time on select pilot projects within fixed duration timeframes. A practice is implemented as a reusable asset consisting of roles, workflows, work products, and guidance. The program runs Scrum sprints where teams are trained and coaches embed the practices within the pilot projects. Feedback matures the practice definitions which then get published across the organization.

The program is governed by an organizational body which manages the practice assets, training, and user communities. It also handles organizational change management.

Case Studies:

This approach has been used in implementing SDLC including Scrum across organizations in the USA and Australia for many years. The paper will briefly describe some of the case studies including how a large healthcare company used this approach, and how an insurance company adopted such Scrum based transformation in replacing its business critical applications while working with multiple COTS vendors from  across the world.

Takeaway:

The audience will gain sufficient insight into how they could approach their Organizational Transformation into Scrum and other Agile Practices.

Timboxing

Ms. PAHUJA, Savita, Xebia

Applying agile is not only a process implementation. It’s more of understanding human behavior and changing the mindset as per agile principles and values. Most of the organizations use scrum out of all the methodologies of agile.

Scrum is timeboxed and motivates team members to complete work within the timeboxes. Result is increase in productivity. Working in timeboxes is equals to creating short milestones and achieving these milestones in a continuous manner.

The reason of this we can understand by Temporal Motivation Theory developed by Piers Steel and Cornelius J. Konig.

So deciding the right timeboxes is very important for getting benefits out of scrum.Will understand this by a simple activity.

Ivy Comptech – Our Agile Tansformation: An experience report on a novel, exceptional and on going large-scale transformation.

Mr. PAMMI, Krishnamurty; Mr. BANDARU, Vijay, IVY Comptech

In this presentation, we will discuss the agile transformation at IVY Comptech, describing how we are introducing Scrum and Kanban at scale. We will be focused on our large development center here in Hyderabad, IVY Comptech, why we undertook this transformation, and detailing how we introduced organizational change, new roles, new ceremonies and a new mindset . We will detail hurdles that we have overcome and enablers that we have employed to address the opportunities and challenges we experience.

The main opportunities that we are focused on today are to increase our market share in digital entertainment in regulated markets – including the U.S., which is in the process of reopening, to increase the strength of our mobile offerings, to modernize our technology and operational maturity and to build a stronger and more cohesive culture.

“Challenges” are to be expected in any rapidly changing enterprise in a dynamic and exciting market, and they must be addressed to survive and thrive. The enterprises which stand out and set an example to the rest are the ones which handle these challenges in a different way leaving the foot prints for others to adapt these good practices and benefit out of them. Healthy organizations continuously learn and re-invent themselves to go from good to great, and this is what we are striving to do.

This is a practical Agile Transformation case study of IVY Comptech. Our key drivers for change include:

• Improve platform and gaming availability
• reduce feature cycle time
• reduce defects in production
• develop flexible, multi-skilled teams
• produce high value features first
• enhance cross site business collaboration

We started our agile journey during September 2013. We want to share the achievements our people are making, which include “Team mind set change”, “Team skills shift”, “Organization Structure Shift” and “organization Culture Shift”. We will also share some of the objectives going forward, with clear focus on the goals we need to address as an organization..

We hope that you will join us!

Fragile Project Management – InHumanely Agile

Mr. KOPPARAPU, Srinivas, Broadridge Financial Services

The topic shares various past experiences on how agile projects have failed due to human resistance, misunderstanding and lack of buy-in at various levels of the organisation. This would be an engaging presentation that shares experiences and also draws upon participant experiences as well.

Are You Trustworthy?
Mr, BHATTIPROLU, Akkiraju, Broadridge Financial Services

Pretotyping before Productyping

Mr. TENG, Daniel, Odd-E

You are doing TDD, ATDD, CD, but are you sure you are dong the right ‘it’? We can do test before writing code, but how about the product itself? How can we know this is the right product?

Building a winning self-organized team

Mr. NANJUNDAPPA, Naveen, Solutions IQ

The most challenging aspect of Agile is building self organised teams. As a coach, I notice that many organisations aren’t aware of Scrum Master role; This powerful role is taken as part-time or not so important for project activity. This presentation focus on how scrum master can add value to the team, what are the focus areas. (With reference to Tuckman’s stages in team development) Scrum master role during the stages where team form, storm, norm and perform. The Technique of team building, protecting and identifying dysfunctions within team. As organisations start adapting scrum the role of scrum master as Facilitator, agile coach, agile leader and change agent stages will be discussed.

Scrum adoption in Tax business

Mrs. VAIDYULA, Suneela, Deloitte

Technology product adoption by business organization faces challenges such as product alignment with business goals, delay in product delivery, and poor end-user adoption. This is further challenging in Tax business wherein Tax professional are busy with statutory timelines, a key to business success. In addition, the business team is not sure of required product features causing constant churning of requirements which means product delays, poor quality, and chaos within engineering team and unhappy business team.

The tax team both business and engineering is taking measures to mitigate the challenges. This includes fast ROI with scrum adoption, inclusive governance between business and IT leader, and business process model, an universal language between IT and business. The Scrum adoption is made possible only if ecosystem is conducive. This required implementing detailed scrum process for project development lifecycle, clearly defined roles and responsibilities of business and IT team, use of appropriate tools to enable scrum adoption, and training to customer, business and engineering team to bring all stakeholders onboard to the scrum adoption.

The measures being taken are showing significant improvement in technology adoption by business. This includes better user experience with product, improved customer satisfaction, and better predictability of delivery.

To summarize scrum adoption enabled with other measures has created a win-win situation for both business and engineering team in technology product adoption.

Track: Team Behaviors (TB)

Tulming Travel Board Game

Ms. SOCHOVA, Zuzi

Tulming Travel Game is an interactive workshop designed as board game to enable the players to use the Agile & Scrum practices in a non-software field. The hand drawn map, hand-drawn cards with cities, harbours and various stations provide a unique experience to players at all levels of knowledge and experience. The goal of the game is to build a virtual Travel agency that, based on a customer wishes, connect cities around the globe to allow the customer to travel freely and safely. As in other board games, there are several events that either prohibit or speed up the building progress and create a true randomness feeling of a real life.

The game is an ideal learning tool to understand Agile mindset and embrace the culture of team collaboration and open communication. The learning has never been so easy, fast and fun.

There is limitation for the game – maximum of four tables, which means 48 participants in total in the game.

ScrumMaster – Is your team in the pink?

Mr. BALASUBRAMANIAN, Rathinakumar, Intuit

Scrum Master protects his/her team from external disturbances. Scrum Master brings food and water to the team. Scrum Master is a servant leader. Scrum Master troubleshoots and resolves impediments for the team.

Every Scrum master knows these duties of them to the team. The bottomline is to build a high-performance agile team. A high-performance agile team is the ultimate proof of scrum master success.

Scrum Master needs to figure out how to help the team to collaborate intensively and keep them together focused on the goal every sprint. The team dynamics and health of the high-performance agile team are always positive and highly productive.

Now how one can assess what is the health of the team? Well, human judgement is a good measure. But can we have some intelligent mechanisms built-in scrum framework to assess the health? If one knows that the team dynamics is not positive, what exactly can a ScrumMaster do to help the team recoup? This workshop will explore the above aspects with some simple but effective techniques, demonstrations and exercises. Participants can use that back in their teams.

Leading Teams: Creating, Nurturing, and leading a self organized team.

Mr. VADAKKAN, Manoj, Northern Star Conulting

Many of the ideas for the lecture section of this session come from the book Leading Teams by Richard Hackman. Other reference books used are The Wisdom of Teams, Management 3.0, and Drive. The tools and concepts we discuss in the session will include

1. What are the characteristics of a real team?
2. How is a compelling and concrete direction helps with team effectiveness?
3. What does a compelling direction look like?
4. How do we create a structure that enables collaboration and creativity within a team?
5. How do we help the team create norms within the structure?

Engaging teams by taking fun seriously.

Mr. TSAL SELA, Dov, ullink

I’ve met Scrum seven years ago, and it was love at first sight, Currently I am serving and annoying two teams at Ullink.

I view my role as a coach, a change agent, and a sort of psychologist but not for people but rather for teams.

I’d like to present the approach I use, and the different tip and tricks that make a difference.

We’ll discuss tapping to emotions, enhancing things that work, how to invite people to take responsibility, and some funny and effective ways to keep the team vibrating.

Hope you join, participate, and share your experience.

Your Team Is Not Agile If……

Mr. MUNDRA, Sunil, ThoughtWorks

The presentation examines behavioral anti patterns of teams and suggests some corrective measures which leaders/managers can take to bring in positive behaviors.

Re-Learning How to Walk: The Agile Way

Mr. BHATTACHARYA, Santanu, Alliance Global Services

There are activities we do and learn by following others and analyzing the relation between the cause and the effect. On the other hand there are complex systems where we deal with unknown unknowns or known unknowns and we don’t find any direct relationship upfront between the cause and effect other than in retrospective after the fact.

The interesting point is, these complex systems may appear to be simple if we are not careful. Since these systems are all around us, we forget the complexity and try to handle it through our lenses of cause and effect analysis as usual, often creating failure.

Building software is a complex system. We often forget that and tend to solve it through the “known” best practices of following well defined steps.  We assume that the effect we got in the past for the causes we imparted will give the same result as before but don’t obtain the desired result. In this talk we will discuss some of the complex skills and expertise we have built since childhood and how that learning approach is important and necessary in solving complex problems.  This presentation will highlight some of the important aspects of being successful in building software.

Track: Scaled Scrum (SS)

Scaled scrum experience report from Allscripts

KULKARNI, Nilesh; Mr. ASHTON, Rod, Allscripts

Outline –

• aligning agile programs, release content, schedule
• align agile teams, capacity planning, organizing resources, optimizing assignments in geographically
• distributed teams
• communication management at multiple levels
• Solution architecture at program level and planning to address complexity
• frequent system demos at multiple levels, cross product system teams
• hardening and integration sprints across projects
• metrics, adaptive governance
• scaled scrum – integration with vendors

Hybrid Agile Project Management Approach for Automobile Industries

Mr. MOHAMED SAFIULLAH, Parvez Alam, Research Development

Project management as a science have been developed from different industry best practices and international standards to ensure a higher rate of success for Engineering & Construction, Industrial Engineering and Information Technology projects. These have been widely used in many organizations effectively. However conventional project management requires relatively complete initial definition of outcomes and scope, which can be problematic for some of New Product Development (NPD) in Automotive Research Development (R & D). The uncertain outcomes cause the scope of work to be dynamic when R & D carried out. Project Management Science, with its structured framework and tools & techniques will benefit Automotive R & D

projects. But in some areas, R & D projects are characterized by complex interrelated activities and large uncertainties about precisely which solution path will be taken.

Different types of projects require different methods. In our everyday lives, we see the value of customizing our approach to different situations. For example, we choose what information to communicate and how to present it based on our audience. We don’t resolve every issue the exact same way; instead, we adjust our approach to be effective for the unique situation. This same concept applies to how we manage our projects.

Conventional project management methodologies can be applied to many automotive R & D projects. At the same time, some projects especially involve knowledge worker projects occurring in uncertain scope and time-constrained environments, call for an agile approach. Many automotive organizations follow Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP), which is a framework of procedures and techniques used to develop products in particularly in the automotive industry. It is a defined process for a product development system for General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and their suppliers. Later couple of automotive companies customized and developed their own project management system.

The present paper going to investigate the current state of formalized project management system in different

Automotive R & D and how these methods could be modified for a success of the projects. Also this study explores the synergetic hybrid agile project management approach by combining the traditional automotive project management methods and newer agile development methods to achieve greater results than sum of their individual results.

Baby steps to become Agile (for Bigger Organizations)

Mr. ATHMAKURI, Sivaram

Scrum is the most popular agile framework and practiced by many companies.

Whether it is an Organisation or Person, they get easily attracted by Scrum concepts after they understand the underlying concepts.

Challenge is whether they can take these concepts and convince management in implementing full Scrum. Size of the Organisation matters in taking such crucial decisions. If Organisations are smaller (like Horse), they can move/change as they like. If organisation is huge/big (like Elephants), they can’t move so easily… even if they want to move.

Recent State of Scrum mentions that

• 13% of those who started with Waterfall now use Scrum exclusively
• Most ended up with a mix of Waterfall and Scrum
• 8% went back to Waterfall

This clearly says 87% of companies have challenges in using Scrum exclusively.

The ten priniples of scaling Agile

Mr. PATHAK, Priyank, Valtech

Summary:

Scaling at enterprise level is an art.

It requires multiple skills & structured way to apply best practices.

This session would be focused on

• Essential practices like –Flow and Lean and the ones from Scrum, XP, Kanban
• Enterprise core values – Agile Values , Code Quality and Lean Values
• Industry best practices – Scaled Framework, DAD, Agility Path Framework, Scaling Lean & Agile Model and other

to Scale Agility at enterprise level.

Content:

Participants would learn and would be able to appreciate the key drivers of Scaling Agility – What is Scaling Agility?

What are the most important aspects of Scaling?

What are the essentials in order to get Scaled & Be Agile?

How to apply them in our enterprise?

Distributed scrum master role for self-Organizing teams

Mr. DHANANJAYA, Deepak; Mr. KRISHNAN, Shiva, Societe Generale

How this all started?

We usually find that the responsibility to ensure that a team continues with its agile practices lies with the scrum master. He/She is expected to organize meetings, facilitate discussions and ensure that all agile practices are followed in the team. In fact the scrum master becomes the most important resource for sustenance of agile practices in a team.

But often the scrum master also becomes the single point of failure. Many times the scrum master tends to become a pseudo-manager, thus defeating the purpose of agility.

In order to address this challenge, we decided to distribute the responsibilities of a scrum master to different team members. We started by trying this out on a team of Agile coaches. After encouraging results we recommended this to 3 different software development teams.

We intend to cover the following topics in our presentation. An outline of the content is mentioned under each topic

How do we achieve this? –

• Brainstorm with the teams and identify important scrum master roles. Some examples could be – facilitating retrospectives, acting as a bridge between the manager and the team, protecting the team from external influences etc.
• Once the roles are identified, the team members pick up the different roles they wish to play.
• We retrospect to identify issues and ways to improve
• Teams are supported with different techniques to execute their roles effectively Techniques –
• Team specific visual management
• Retrospection on the scrum master role
• Contracting to understand roles
• Using daily stand-ups to coordinate activities

What are the benefits?

• Positive behavioral changes
• Exhibiting collective ownership
• Forming self organized teams
• Sustenance of agile practices
• The whole team understands the essence of agility

Does this work for all teams?

• Distributed teams
• Large/ small team
• Teams working on production support

What are the challenges with such a model?

• Operational issues
• Adoption issues

Case studies

Scaling Scrum practices to large distributed teams and its challenges

Ms. WANDILE, Pooja, Persistent

Agile methods were originally designed for small co-located teams that encourage close collaboration and face to face communication. Gradually, the adoption of agile methods increased beyond small and co-located teams to large and distributed teams. This paper presents a case study of implementing scaling scrum practices on large distributed teams and various challenges that were seen during the implementation. It also highlights the need for combining some of the traditional project management practices along with agile practices for better results as well as presents a model of implementing scaling scrum practices.

Villains and Heroes of Scaled Agile

Mr. PRABHAKARAN, M Maris, Legerity Consulting Services

When we scale agile to enterprise level, there are Several VILLAINS (Myths& Pitfall) appears as impediments to scale. Everyone is interested to know who are the Villains for the scaled agile.

Will be listing all the villains for the scaled agile and let all know how it impacts.

We found the impediments (villains) for scaling and then question comes, how can we overcome the villains (impediments) and save the enterprise!!

We need HERO to save the enterprise from Villains. There are several heroes available for the scaled Agile in market (SAFe, DAD, LESS, Scrum PLOP..) .

What are their powers? Are they right Hero for us who will create value and save us? Each heroes might have niche power. Are they help us to re move our impediments? If not, then we need a ‘SUPERHERO’.

Superhero strategy is the successfully implemented framework (strategy) for the enterprise which created value and this strategy will vary with context of the organisation. Five common contextual strategy will be presented.

This session will list down all practical contextual winning strategy for the SUPERHERO to remove the impediments.

What and What Not, Portfolio Lead Retrospects

Mrs. BARVE, Yashasree; Mr. SHAH, Dipen, Tata Consultancy Services

Being agile enables the software development groups in Enterprises to deliver high value and high quality software with speed. However legacy applications along with the overall Enterprise landscape pose their own challenges that are outside of the scrum framework to solve. Multiple small scrum teams though working on separate applications need to be cohesive with a big picture. As a portfolio lead, who owns multiple applications and teams related to a portfolio within an Enterprise is a Chicken in scrum terminology. The expectation from the role is that of leader, scrum master as well as an Architect providing technical and functional oversight to the teams within the portfolio.

This session is about a retrospective of our work life as a Portfolio Lead who takes care of multiple scrum teams, and applications. We would like to speak about the top 3 challenges faced such as Scaling Production Support / Knowledge Retention for applications delivered through Scrum, Impact of Organizational Transformation initiatives on the scrum teams, and Multiple Stakeholder Expectations / Conflict Management through real life examples of our work. We would retrospect what we did, and discuss and debate what worked well, and what did not.

Size of the organization: at a macro level. the development group is about 400 developers and the support group is around 100 engineers.

More specific details about the development portfolio described in the proposal are as follows:

3-4 scrum teams with varied skills such as java, ruby, database, search technology, iOS development as well as cms like Drupal, alfresco. Around 20 developers in all 10-12 existing apps enhancements as well as 2-3 new application development.

The session would focus on top 3 challenges faced:

• Production Support / Knowledge Retention for applications delivered through Scrum
• Impact of Organizational Transformation initiatives on the scrum teams
• Multiple Stakeholder Expectations / Conflict Management

Track: Around Scrum (AS)

Scrum meets Management 3.0

Mr. ÅHLANDER, Arne, Aqqurite

In this session we will take a look at the six views on organizations from Management 3.0

For each view we will discuss how it can be applied to strengthen the implementation of Scrum.

Agile Coaching – Giving and Receiving Feedback

Dr. SOLANKI, Ajay, Bank Of America

Feedback is the most important aspect of Agile. Agile is based on the feedback loop. Feedback occurs between various people within the team. Scrum Master and team, Product Owner and team, Product Owners and Scrum Master, Product Owner and Stakeholders and clients. As our default human nature we are unable to give productive feedback. The way the feedback is given often creates a lose lose situation. Is there any way by which we can give feedback, get the work done and also the person does not feel bad. This is an important skill which can be learnt by practice. Let us explore the techniques of giving and receiving feedback and create a strong team.

Scaling scrum environment for easier DevOps adoption

ARFEEN, Serajul ; ARORA, Naveen,CA Technologies

SCRUM is the most adopted development framework in software industry today making it the most popular agile methodology. A high level observation at all the agile methodologies adopted in Research & Development organization and DevOps practices reveals that both started as a movement and throughout their journey they evolved catering to the needs of the common challenges in an organization. In other words scrum or any of the agile methodology is anti-prescriptive i.e. through continuous inspect and adapt teams prefer best practices that works for them. It is also observed that most of the core values in Scrum and DevOps are same or complimentary viz. collaboration, continuous delivery, mitigating risks at an early stage of SDLC and this makes them a natural case for their seamless integration.

Agile Leaders think on agile adoption in enterprise organizations as a continuous journey in producing a high quality release in a time bounded interval. With the DevOps now at the center of enterprise software lifecycle strategy, it has become more important for agile scrum teams to respond to challenges arose by inherent traditional conflicts between Dev and Ops; a perfect example to support the mentioned statement is when developers preference is for a quick deployment of the working code on production and they go with the culture of ‘Do it now..” whereas operations emphasizes on the process and the documentation in order to deploy and doing it systematically.

Logically, the integration of Scrum and DevOps can be seen at two levels – one at the level of principles & values like commitment, culture, focus, courage and openness and second in integration of the practices like IT Automation, team collaboration, and continuous integration to name a few in teams that have either adopted or in phase of adopting DevOps.

In keeping the discussed challenges in picture, we are suggesting a solution “scrumOps” in this presentation which will help teams in scaling scrum for DevOps environment. ScrumOps will ensure the exponential success of timely product release and team collaboration which in turn results in greater volume of customer satisfaction.

Maturing the Agile Way – A Roadmap for Continuous Improvement

Mr. BURRA, Sekhar Burra, ADP

Agenda:

• Introduction to Maturity Models
• Qualitative Assessment Model
• Quantitative Assessment Model
• ScrumMaster Maturity Assessment Model
• Closing

Culture & Agility

Mr. ZACHARIAH, Joe

Do local cultural influencers play any role in success of Agile adoption in a firm? Often times I hear from my IT Industry colleagues in India that Agile adoption in India is very difficult, because of the way Indians work – For e.g.: Indians are very hierarchy driven, or Indians find it difficult to say no. This is not really the case.

Regional cultures have minimal impact on how successful a particular firm based in that region is in Agile adoption. However organizational culture plays a bigger role in the success of Agile adoptions. Organizational culture is a by- product of various factors including Regional Culture, Leadership vision, Senior workforce attrition, New Hires, Diversity & Inclusion practices. Key measures of organizational culture are factors like Transparency, Encouraging Dissent, Less Hierarchy, Openness, Risk appetite towards failures, Strong focus on learning and being more people oriented than process oriented. Using these factors one can map an organizations’ culture.

Referring to the framework introduced by William Schneider for organizational cultures, while most organizations have multiples types of culture, there tends to be one culture-type – “the way things get done around here” – that influences the vast majority of people working in that organization. Understanding this culture serves as an excellent guidepost to determine if adopting agile will be successful, marginal, or a failure.

The four types of organizational cultures that we can map an organization into are Collaboration, Competence and Cultivation & Control. There is no culture that is good or bad here, it’s just the way the culture in an organization has evolved depending on the circumstances that helped it grow. In fact, it is sometimes not even easy to map an organization’s culture. Most firms have one dominant culture and other supporting cultures. Agile Adoption successes lend themselves more to Collaboration and Cultivation kind of Organization cultures. That said, it doesn’t mean that other types of culture will fail in their journey towards Agile adoption. Every organization culture has values that map up for successful Agile Adoption. You need to find those values in your organization that lend themselves favorably for Agile Adoption and mould your strategy for Agile Adoption around it. For example: The Agile Scrum methodology lends itself well towards Collaboration and Cultivation kind of Organization cultures, whereas Kanban lends itself well towards a Control type of culture. If your organization has newly started making strides towards Agile adoption, you will get some tips from my talk on how to map your organization’s culture and how to find those elements of your culture that could help build your Agile adoption strategy around it. Finally if we want to be successful in adopting Agile (or anything else) it is essential to focus on harmony with the existing culture. Pushing for different culture will lead to conflict. After all it is said to be the culture that eats strategy for breakfast.

Prioritization techniques

Mr. GUPTA, Unnat;Mr. DAMANI, Shree, Thoughtworks

Customers are never thrilled to find out they can’t get all the features they want in release 1.0 of a new software product. In reality, customer expectations are high, timelines are short, and resources are limited.

Any project with resource limitations has to establish the relative priorities of the requested features, use cases, or functional requirements. Prioritization helps the project manager resolve conflicts, plan for staged deliveries, and make the necessary trade-off decisions. Thus, requirement prioritization is used in Software development for determining which requirements of the software product/application should be included in a certain release. Requirements are also prioritized to minimize risk during development so that the most important or high risk requirements are implemented first. Several methods for assessing a prioritization of software requirements exist. Several methods for assessing a prioritization of software requirements exist.In this workshop we are going show some of the techniques/games we have used for feature prioritization.

The New Force In Software Development

Mr. CHADDHA, Rishi, Independent

This is two-part presentation; first part will go through the basic of Lean software development. The second hour will be dedicated to understanding Kanban in practical way. The agenda is as follows:

• 5 Principles of Lean: Value, Value stream, Flow, Pull and Perfection
• 7 Principles of Lean Software Development:
• Eliminate Waste
• Build Quality In
• Defer Commitment
• Deliver Fast
• Respect People
• Optimize The Whole
• 7 Deadly Waste
• Defects -> Bugs
• Overproduction -> Extra Feature
• Transportation -> Hands off
• Waiting -> Delays
• Inventory -> Partially Completed Work
• Motion -> Task Switching
• (Over) Processing -> Unneeded Processes
• Overview of Kanban
• Does Kanban matter to me?
• How does Kanban work?
• Visualize the workflow
• Limit WIP
• Measure the lead time
• What are the benefits of Kanban?
• Can I combine Kanban with my current process?
• Where is Kanban used?
• Common misunderstandings about Kanban

Track: Scrum and Lifecycle Tools (SLM)

Battlefield Agility

Mr KATHURIA, Madhur, Xebia

Battlefield Agility® is a quest to make our deliveries better, more collaborative, faster and effective. It relies on age-old principle from the Army to provide a holistic view of the problem landscape which a project team needs to solve and be able to succeed in this, through small collaborative groups working in coordination to achieve bigger goals.

Battlefield Agility derives from the Agile manifesto and principles and adds to it the key ingredient of individual wisdom to create a plan for a team which will help it succeed in successful deliveries . This is a goal based approach to increase MVP and ROI.

The purpose of this method is to make team members more focused about their work, equal distribution of work in the team and increase productivity.

Battlefield Agility enumerates the mechanisms of planning, better field view to all team members, ease of multitasking, reduce task switching.

Agile Project Management With Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

Mr. BANG, Om Prakash, Microsoft

This presentation is to give overview of Agile Planning for continuous delivery for value,  Agile Project Management dashboard, Sprint Planning, Burn Down Charts.  Distributed project team collaborate using Team Room, Task board update for all work and used during Daily Stand Up meeting.

Out of box (OOB) template for CMMI, Agile and Scrum.  The main distinctions between the three default process templates are in the work item types they provide for planning and tracking work. Visual Studio Scrum is the most light-weight and MSF for Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) provides the most support for formal processes and change management.

1. Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2013 – Choose Visual Studio Scrum if your team manages bugs along with product backlog items during sprint planning.
2. MSF for Agile Software Development 2013 – Choose Agile if your organization triages bugs separately from the product backlog and resolves work items before closing them. Also, choose Agile if your team allocates time for bugs with each sprint.
3. MSF for CMMI Process Improvement 2013  – Choose CMMI if your organization triages bugs separately from the product backlog, resolves work items before closing them, and tracks changes to requirements formally. The CMMI template is designed to support formal change management processes.

Agile and CMMI

Mr. KABRA, Ajay, Independent

In this presentation, we shall identify and discuss the myths and misperceptions that are existing in our industry and we consider most damaging to a correct understanding of both paradigms, and suggest ways to improve our understanding of both of these Powerful approaches for effective software development.

In hindsight, it is acknowledged that the way in which CMMI was developed and introduced may have helped cause some users to misunderstand the true message and nature of CMMI1. Such misunderstanding may have led to inconsistent and ineffective use of CMMI in the Scrum World. Further, we identify common misperceptions in the Agile community about CMMI and common misperceptions in the CMMI community about Agile.

In many ways, these misperceptions are related to the misuse of CMMI and Agile, but misperceptions can also be attributed to a shortage of accurate information as well as a persistent belief in notions and experiences that are not part of either approach.

Some in the Agile community use CMM concepts to judge CMMI unfairly. For example, incorrectly referring to the goal of maturity level 2 as creating repeatable processes persists to this day. In some recent posts to a CMMI-related online forum, a few participants have admitted to not knowing CMMI like they know the CMM.

An important aside is that when practitioners are naming their activities, the labels “CMMI” and “Agile” are often applied too freely when practitioners are not following either approach properly. These situations contribute to negative perceptions of both approaches.

A Reflection on the Retrospectives

Ms. LEDALLA, Madhavi, SolutionsIQ

This presentation highlights the importance of one of the key ceremonies of the sprint “The Retrospective” and then goes through some of the common challenges teams face while doing the retrospectives and puts forth few ideas on how to make these meetings thought-provoking ones! We will be discussing few common challenges, why this happens and few strategies that could help in making these meetings lively. Then we will also talk about Joint retrospectives – Why is it needed, who participates, when it is done, where it is done, how it is done, benefits and challenges. Finally we would conclude the session with a retrospective activity.

We now know that CMMI and Agile can be used together successfully.

Mr. JULKA, Sharad, Xebia

In this session, I run a workshop to introduce A3 process as a tool for continuous improvement for teams. A3 process has been largely used to identify core areas of improvement, detail out plans to execute those improvements. I will also be sharing which are those situations when an A3 process gives more output and value.

High Performance SCRUM Teams Delivered

Mr. CHICKMAGALUR, Mohan, Independent

The topic mainly focuses on creation of High Performance SCRUM Teams within an Organization. The topic looks at the Behaviors patterns, environment and culture within the Organizations creating High Performing SCRUM Teams. In my journey as an Agile Coach, I have got opportunities to work with various Organizations who helped me help them to creates High Performing Team. This topic would be a coaches view-point on the same and the kind of journey that i went through transforming teams which in turn transformed me.

Agile Collaboration Games
Mr. SUDAME, Rahul, Faichi Solutions

In this session, participants will practice various Agile innovation games, which can be used to build collaboration amongst the team members and stakeholders. During the workshop, participants will engage in discussions about some best practices or real-life challenges faced by Project Managers and will practice Agile Innovation games to share their experiences with the group.

This exercise will bring out many best practices as well as challenges faced by participants from various project teams. Agile Innovation games are very effective for learning and applying Agile practices to identify and solve some of the project issues through team collaboration. It helps in discovering new ideas and also helps in enhancing collaboration within the teams. We would learn and practice some of the Innovation Games with real life examples which would help the participants to can conduct these games with their teams going forward.