Step by Step guide to installing Robot Framework

Robot framework has been a little tricky for most folks though now provides an installer for windows, but still it is best to know the detailed steps if you do not wish to use the Installer.

So let's get started -

Installing Robot framework - requires Python installation first as a pre-requisite.

All steps below for Windows OS (32/64 bit)

Step 1. Install Python version 2.7.8 
(supported Python version for Robot Framework version greater than 2.7)

https://www.python.org/downloads/
Installer Files:  python-2.7.8 - for 32 bit / python-2.7.8.amd64 - for 64 bit

Ex. Installed at c:\python27\

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Top 5 Agile project Myths – Smashed !

Catching a glimpse of a snake charmer on a busy Indian metropolis, is a big myth that many foreigners visiting India still cherish (wishful thinking you might say!). But the reality is that snake charming is illegal in India (India Wildlife Act) and has been for a number of years, although snake charmers do still exist and are now an ‘elusive’ sight. But the myth still exists and something similar is the case with the agile projects and the myths surrounding them.

If you take a look at the the annual state of agile surveys for last few years, they have been throwing similar results wrt 'Concerns' about Agile (read as Myths – see below Reference1), reflecting the dismal failure of the agile enthusiasts to be unable to bust the folk tales surrounding the agile projects delivery. This post hopes to therefore Smash the Top 5 agile project myths (popular faolke tales), with a pinch of sugar/salt (take your pick) for added flavour.

Source: Reference 1

Myth1– Agile projects do No Planning

The traditional projects have a Big plan upfront, and planning is highly visible, with a complete plethora of activities, draining the energy for a couple of weeks\months, and resulting in a sometimes scary GANTT chart.

But Agile projects instead focus on Continuous planning, and planning is therefore invisible!

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Mr. Product Manager: Are you ready for the brave new Agile world ?

This was an interesting question, which got me thinking to rant out on the state of product managers in the Scrum India meetup in 2011.

The fact is that after couple of years later, I still see that the product management is not ready and not ready to embrace the new world. So here's my wake up call again for them (from my archives) and possibly make atleast some of them embrace the new agile world now. You can hear my rant (pecha kucha style) in the video below. Feel free to drop me a note on your experiences.

Agile Balanced Scorecard - Does it exist ?

It is indeed a difficult question to answer!  The "Agile" Balanced Scorecard may or may not exist today (the literature published is pretty scant on this), but if you are looking for developing this scorecard or modifying your existing Balanced Scorecard for your organization, then you may want to watch my video below in the Agile India Kerala 2013 conference titled - Balanced Scorecard for the Agile Enterprise
Watch the Video here

3 Simple steps to build your Continuous Delivery Dashboard

Continuous Delivery is gaining traction now, but it is never easy to get funding :-|| But using Lean Value Stream Maps you can now showcase tangible efficiency gains by following these 3 simple steps to build your Continuous Delivery dashboard.

In uncertain times, people always struggle with executive funding for resources (infrastructure asset purchases and/or dedicated people). This is where I have borrowed the Lean Value Stream maps (VSM) to showcase visible dashboards focused on process efficiency gains, resulting in hard $$$ savings, and help win executives approval, for funding the various activities under the Continuous Delivery initiatives.

Here is a basic definition for Continuous Delivery, which is a set of practices and  principles aimed at, building, testing and releasing software faster and more frequently. The practices would typically include configuration management, continuous integration, automated testing, deployment automation, build pipelines and an agile team delivering frequent releases.

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Is your engineering team leaning to "Heaven" or "Hell" ?

Listening to the legendary Eagles, Hell Freezes Over album, it always touches a high point for me with the lyrics -

I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself
'This could be heaven or this could be Hell

Well the mission for the engineering team(s) is to provide a continuous flow of business value to the stakeholders, with stable teams working at a sustainable pace, while improving their technical excellence daily.

But do we really know if we are any closer to achieving this mission or are we simply stuck and wondering if we are holed up and have no way out ?

So to find the answer, take this 20 Questions survey below and SCORE your engineering team(s) to check your WAY,  and find if you are indeed leaning towards Heaven or Hell ?

For each question below, use this RATINGS SCALE below to assign a score to your response -
• 1 – 4  : No , we do not ….……you are possibly closer to HELL than you think ~~
• 5 – 7  : we try and succeed mostly…..you are moving closer to Heaven
• 8 – 10 : we do this almost every time and love it ..you are reaching HEAVEN-ly Bliss !!

Prerequisites:

1. Are using ‘High Maturity’ Engineering Practices and Tools ?
2. Do you have Sponsors commitment to Technical Excellence ?
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Enterprise Customer Feedback : Lost Horizon or Last Horizon ?

Are your enterprise customers giving you the feedback when your engineering team wants it or do you lose your delivery heartbeats with late or non existent customer feedback ? To explore this further, let's rewind while fast forwarding a little.

Today the future of Business and IT is to GO Digital, with an increased need for the CMO and CIO to coordinate and deliver value to their stakeholders. But the 2013 Gartner study for CIO's indicates that this customer value delivery gap is still a major challenge with "the vast majority of IT organizations need to address fundamental gaps in their performance".

Thought it appears that the IT world has in the last decade or so made some progress with this metric of delivering customer value, (quote below) and have started to learn and some are now able to Build-IT-RIGHT now unlike the past, but still there is a long way to go....(68% still feel that customer value is not delivered by IT)

32% of the respondents felt that delivering customer value was most valued by their organization’s executives for the delivery of Scrum-based projects 
Source: State of Scrum 2013, Scrum Alliance

This intense focus on the ability to Build-IT-RIGHT is primarily thanks to the force of iterative agile delivery model with short iterations combined with some XP practices of pair programming, test driven development, and continuous delivery (including continuous integration and continuous deployment) .

But Build-IT-RIGHT assumes that the "closed loop" will always have a customer onsite, ready to provide instant feedback and ignores the dark reality of the real world scenarios. But in my experience most IT teams implementing agile methodologies today face one or more of these situations :

1. No colocated Customer with the IT team
2. No colocated Customer representative with the IT team (Product Owners are just a bad substitute!)
3. Customer feedback is non existent
4. Customer feedback rarely  - once in a year via Customer Advisory Board or similar
5. Customer feedback has long cycles typically more than 6 months 

The naysayers will indeed argue for the Cloud based application deployments which may be a rising trend with a tepid growth but the majority of the world is still run by enterprise applications hosted internally by the customer IT teams, and hence have a LOOONG phase gate approach to accepting new versions. The old IT world mindset still rules with mistrust and high risk as key factors for accepting the status-quo.

For the few lucky organizations, the new world mindset allows them to embrace the Lean Startup mode, with A/B tests as rapid feedback, Dual Scrum tracks and Continuous Delivery models. But this closing of the feedback loop is still a long way to go mainstream. Till then we are close to  there but still missing out on the Last Horizon to achieving IT and Business agility.

In Summary, with the IT teams as both a consumer and a provider of services to the business, this new mindset is an opportunity for the CIO's to conquer this LOST Horizon !

What's your experience on customer feedback (especially enterprise customers) ? Have you captured this LAST Horizon ? or are you losing the horizon ?