Working as the project manager in outsourcing companies in our country means that you are responsible for almost everything – writing the specification, creating application prototypes, schedules, plans. Sometimes you can even find yourself writing tests or editing designs. As a result, busy and tired PMs completely forget about their teams. They start treating them as resources. 1 item of development resource. “Hmm…Let’s put this 2 items on this projects and that one will go here. They are from the different offices/buildings? No matter…They are professionals! So they just have to write code.” As people are simply the “functions” they provide. And not even noticing we start using all the tips from “How to prevent teams formation” list.
Common problems while adopting scrum
Have you heard someone saying “I tried scrum and it didn’t work. Scrum is not working at all!” I heard that many times. It is difficult to admire that it was not the methodology fault, it was your fault that everything failed. The big challenge is that there is no out of a box solution, which suits anyone. You need to go through all the way from the learning to mastery, face a lot of difficulties, overcome them, master the copying and them move to adopting the process for you – changing and improving it. So let’t discuss the problems PM can face while adopting new methodology (you know what I talking about ^_^) All these promlems are from my and my colleagues experience.
We vs they: agile testing
We talk a lot about developers in agile processes but sometimes almost forget about testers. They are usually rather calm and silent people, so they pass through all the project launch meetings and then come to me to ask the important question “Agile is great…But what should I do with my testing activities? What is the role of QA in agile processes?”
As usual, I start my answer with “Folk, it really depends… Let’s see what we might do this time”. So, I will try to describe what we tried and how we failed/succeeded.
Offshore Agile – when your PO is far away
I am sure this scenario will sound so familiar to you. You have a great agile team and great PO overseas. But he can’t devote much time to the distributed team. Yes, you asked him and he tried. But failed – he can’t spent so much time on discussing these user stories. The team starts suffering from the lack of understanding. The user stories are not ready for the development – they are not analyzed and communicated properly. If you ever solved the same issue – let’s continue discussion in the post.
@tisquirrel 