Continuous Testing: Building Agility at Scale

As organizations scale their agile efforts and work across distributed locations, integrate products across business units, and develop solutions with their partners and become suppliers, they are facing integration challenges at an even bigger scale.  I will be discussing some of the challenges and solutions in upcoming postings.

The worlds of testing, development and the operations teams had already been struggling to collaborate in the software industry (with or without agile) and only recently have been able to reconcile to some extent, led by aggressive ALM (application lifecycle management) vendors and the upcoming DevOps movements. But the sheer size of integration due to scale complexities has further exaggerated this problem !

But the agilistas have many  tools to beat this complexity and the challenges can be  overcome by combining these. Reflecting back and recognizing the power of available techniques -  from extreme programming methodologies to the power of automated testing -  the agile toolkit offers a heavenly state of "Continuous Testing", which allows the organization to reduce the costly integration errors and provide continuous visibility to the business stakeholders while maintaining continuous high quality benchmarks.

Continuous Testing is based on the integrated framework of continuous integration (build stage) and continuous delivery (deploy stage) pipelines, which allow the engineering teams to run multiple builds and deploy cycles per change (using a continuous integration server) and performing the testing activities in parallel, across the various application life-cycle stages. The term ‘continuous testing’ was coined in 2003, to run the tests continuously to enable rapid feedback, while the source code is being changed.

I will be discussing more on the details of Continuous Testing in my upcoming series. Keep watching this space....

Agile Manufacturing - Dream on, dream ON !

If you ever thought that 'Test Driven Development' was difficult to adopt in your co-located, software teams, then see how these XTREME Agile practices, along with 'Pairing' and 'Kanban' have been applied to the Manufacturing World, which is being shaken up by WIKISPEED, breaking down the traditionally long cycles, barriers and conventions.

Watch this TED video by the founder, Joe Justice on how he is challenging the automotive world using Agile techniques and building the most ultra efficient, modular cars on the planet today, possibly paving the way to the future for "selling transportation" instead of selling cars.


If you have a similar story to share, drop in your comments and enjoy !

what really is my secret sauce ?

In the quest to deliver business value quicker, enterprise agile transformations are common and growing, leaving the organization CXO's confused and struggling in the myriad universe of agile process and tools. They hear Scrum, Lean, XP, Kanban, DSDM, FDD, and are asking their team which ones should I choose ? Based on my experiences with enterprise wide transformations, I would love to share as to what really is my secret sauce?

The answer is not a simple YES only Scrum works ! and NO XP does not work !

Instead the real story is about a new breed of agilistas, who are mixing the various ingredients and bringing an integration of the various methodologies to deliver the promise of faster turnarounds and keeping the CXO's smiling. The amazing process landscape map by Mark Kennaley, as referred by Carson Holmes, summarizes this beautifully below and points to the SDLC3.0 wave approaching and becoming the new world order till we get to the next evolution.

SDLC 3.0
Courtsey: Fourth Medium Consulting

As the agile community evolves, the real adoption levels of these varied methodologies will always remain a hot topic...but now you know my secret sauce! But I would really love to hear your comments on which methodologies are actually converging in your organization? Is it Scrum and Kanban ? or Lean and XP practices with AMDD ? Tell me about your secret sauce in the comments now.

Product Manager - version 2.0 @ Scrum India Dec 2011

The Scrum India Dec 2011 NCR meetup at Xebia, offered me a perfect opportunity to rant about my expectations from today's Product Managers in the agile world today, as we go about our daily (product development) chores. This post was takeoff from my earlier post sometime back on bringing the business dashboard closer to the workforce on the ground and linking the agile world with the overall business objectives. Feel free to comment on my digs and leave your feedback in the comments.

Ofcourse my presentation was in the Pecha Kucha style (my first one) and think i did ok :-),but you can watch my presentation video recording at the WizIQ channel.

Overall it was interesting to hear Amit Somani (MakeMyTrip) and their struggles to get the product managers, with some controversial points by Rajat Bhalla (Vinsol). You can watch all the video recordings at the WizIQ channel (video recording sponsors).

Product Manager - version 2.0 

Product Manager - version 2.0

View more presentations from Asheesh Mehdiratta

Agile Balanced Scorecard at Agile Tour India 2011, Pune

As part of the Scrum Alliance, Agile Tour India, Pune conducted a track on Agile Enterprise and my session on "Balanced Scorecard for the Agile Enterprise" was selected. The session focused on how Balanced Scorecard has traditionally been used across multiple industries for managing the organization performance towards the achievement of it's strategic goals. This session introduced key performance indicators for a Balanced Scorecard in an Agile context, which could lead to similar strategic focus and organizational alignment and how to capture the typical agile metrics in the overall Balanced scorecard for software projects. The session was extremely well received by the enthusiastic audience of 100+ attendees, comprising CXO's, senior managers and development community.

Agile Balanced Scorecard -Agile Tour 2011 Pune

View more presentations from Asheesh Mehdiratta

7 Steps to winning Agile wars

Sharing my presentation at the Agile NCR 2011, talking about the 7 step framework for introducing bottoms up agility in your organization. Watch out for details in my next blog posts.

How did you win your wars ? leave a comment...

Asheesh Mehdiratta Agile NCR 2011

View more presentations from mehdiraa.

Speaking at Agile NCR 2011

Delighted as I will be speaking in the Agile NCR 2011 conference, Delhi...you can catch my talk on 25th Feb 2011 (4:00PM)....http://agilencr.org/pages/agenda

I will be speaking - 7 steps to winning Agile wars ...

any thoughts on this? Shoot me an email and I will try my best to answer in my talk. wish me luck !