Self confidence

 

Pre-planning, sprint planning, Elaboration sessions

 

• Planning event

• Go through in-flight user stories, check what statuses they are in, whether they can be completed in the current sprint, which ones need to be carried over to the next sprint.

• Daily stand up

• Each associate plans for the current day

• Dependencies if any

• What help is required from the team

• Anything else that needs discussion.

• What bugs are there, why, what happens, etc. etc.

• 2 Catch ups with BAs every week - Backlog refinement (No elaboration sessions)

• Three Amigos

• PO

• Developer

• Tester

• Outcome is a clear understanding of the functionality to be delivered.

• Clear acceptance criteria.

• Documented test scenarios.

• Should happen as soon as a developer picks up a user story from sprint backlog.

• User Story Handover meeting

• Explain what the user story is (after three amigos).

• What acceptance criteria is

• What testing is required

• Any other questions / queries around the functionality.

• User story points

• Sprint review / showcase

• Retro event

What is expected →

SPRINT PLANNING

Planning itself can be split into three activities:

• Pre-planning / backlog grooming

• Who - PO, SM, BA and key team members

• When - mid sprint

• What

• 10 to 15% of time

• Add new epics and user stories

• Extract stories from existing epics (refinement).

• Estimate effort in T-shirt sizing

• PO identifies candidate user stories (based on priority) for the next sprint.

• Team helps PO prioritize / re-prioritize based on tech feasibility.

• Sprint planning

• Who - PO and entire team

• When - beginning of every sprint

• What

• PO and team negotiate on which user stories will be tackled in the sprint

• Time boxed to 2-4 hours

• PO describes highest priority features to the team

• Team may split user stories to tasks

• PO answers questions, clarifies acceptance criteria and may renegotiate.

• Team sizes user story in story points.

• Result is 

• A SPRINT GOAL

• A SPRINT BACKLOG

• Elaboration session

• Who - PO, Developer, Tester

• When - addressed progressively at various points in the sprint.

• What

• Big user stories are progressively broken down into finer user stories and filled up with more details. 

• Elab ensures that unanswered questions are answered.

Don't use ticket numbers in standups

https://www.industriallogic.com/training/elearning/

Scrum Drawbacks (Based on blackbot post)

 https://medium.com/blackblot/product-management-and-the-2020-scrum-guide-free-at-last-eea0287d24db

• Scrum guide is intentionally unclear and incomplete (lacks methodological guidelines / foundation rules. Therefore one is forced to interpret terms and meanings. 
• Vagueness makes it possible to interpret scrum differently to fit different peoples' situations and opinions. Allows people to generate any scrum interpretation they want to agree with. 
• This vagueness has created an entire commercial industry around scrum, selling frameworks / scaled models. 
• Because of above, Scrum cannot be judged as wrong or right. Every interpretation appears okay within its own context.
• Absence of guidelines leads people to count a particular term in the scrum guide hoping that a higher frequency of a term would mean something. 
• None of the Scrum guides explain how Scrum views or defines value, what product management is, nor how value is tied to the product manager role or product management.

Big Data

What is Big Data?

Extremely large data sets that may be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions.

Characteristics of Big Data

1. Volume
2. Velocity
3. Variety
4. Variability
5. Veracity
6. Visualisation
7. Value

Tools & Technologies I have used in latest project

•  VM Ware
• IntelliJ
• Ubuntu
• Linux Scripts
• Github
• Jenkins
• SCTP
• IBM BPM
• XSLT
• XML
• XPath
• Java
• Drools
• Rancher

Types of testing I have done in projects

• Test automation / regression testing
• Functional Testing
• Business Rules Testing
• Testing Technical User Stories (database upgrade, Java upgrade, etc.)
• Blue-Green testing
• Negative testing
• Exploratory testing
• Smoke testing (Automated - test things we expect to work).
• Performance testing - out of scope
•  Security testing
• API testing