About me

I am a Software development professional. When not at work, I alike to read books and online technical articles, blogs etc.

I like technical challenges. They keep me engrossed and busy.

I am Certified Scrum Master and active in Agile and Scrum Communities. I often attend various conferences and am an active blogger on subjects like Agile, Scrum, current technological and Internet affairs etc.

 

Towards Better Scrum WoW

It’s a pity if someone makes only a couple of blog posts in a year. This time it has been more than a year for me and no blogging. Reading has taken over all contribution instincts.  Coming out of that mould needs something as powerful as this blog post from Jesse.

With that premises, you would expect some Scrum bashing in this post. If you do, I would not disappoint.

I have myself been a Scrum guide for a development group of reasonable size. It started very well with very good intentions. And people including myself have spent years in making sure it clicks. But if I look back at the years we have been doing Scrum, am I satisfied, or even content about the usage of Scrum? May be not very much.

There are many reasons why Scrum doesn’t work. Or doesn’t work as good as it should. When you see from the Indian context, you discover many more reasons why it becomes chaotic.

In my View Following are only few of the reasons:

Managers

Agile or Scrum focus on teams, and do not prescribe a lot for managers. In an organization where top is not light, the Scrum implementation is bound to face additional issues. Then you would surely listen someone shouting “Hey, Scrum doesn’t say there is no need of managers”. I think it creates chaos. Top heavy organizations simply cannot get all benefits of Agile practices.

Flexibility

This is the most frustrating of the reasons for me, whenever I came across finding solutions for a Scrum related issue. Most of the people believe that “You adapt”, “You learn and improve”, “Anything working for others will not necessarily work for you” and blah blah. I am not saying all of this is bullshit. But it leaves a lot of room for all kind of people to experiment, many times pathetically with Scrum. Do we need a very strict set of instructions in Scrum to counter this? May be not, but keeping everything completely open definitely doesn’t work.

Certifications

Scrum Alliance isn’t bad. There are very good people associated with that organization. Why I took the name of SA very first? Just because in my view they are most popular today in business of selling stupidly easy certifications on Scrum. They provide “Certified Scrum Master” or CSM. You also have Scrum.org who provide PSM certification. Then there is more: “International Scrum Institute” who are ready to give away their coveted “Scrum master accredited certification”. Today I believe most of this stuff is money making gimmick. My experience is that these programs are more focused on making money, not on making a certification program where only good people are able to get passing marks.

Jugaad

I attended a Pete Demer session years back. He told Indian people have somehting not found anywhere else. It is called JUGAAD. I am not going to provide any further explanation of it here, as I think it’s more of an insult than recognition. This Jugaad has indeed given rise to many problems. One of those problems is resistance for orderliness. Due to our pro-jugaad mindset, we in India tend to seek for “exceptions” in everything. For example, if we find it very difficult to get work done in some government office, we seek if it is possible to grease palms of some Babu to get work done quickly. Scrum also suffers due to this mindset. We tend to seek exceptions in every necessary ingredient of Scrum.

Many other things are coming to my mind right now. I remember Jesse delivering a talk in Agile NCR a few years back, where he beautifully explained how Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean etc are typecasted and why all of them are processes, not “tools” or “methods” or “practices”. I wanted to see that ppt today, but unfortunately couldn’t find on web. When I was attending that talk, I was thinking how a “Certified Scrum Coach” can say such things. It needs courage and Jesse had that, at that moment.

What I have mentioned today is not all I wanted to say. There is more. Rest for some other time, on the same topic.

Google Auto Complete.. who wins?

Once upon a time there was an experiment in Google called Google Suggest (This link redirects to Google Auto Complete which is now default feature of Google searches across the globe).

I liked the concept since it brought promise of proactively helping the user to chose the right content.

However, you should expect more from a devil’s advocate like me.

Exploring Google Keywords (again a labs feature that is now part of Google Adwords product), I realized it is not only user’s comfort that suggested Google to suggest the search terms.

If you start typing “used cars”, Intelligent Google floods you with suggestions like “used cars in delhi”, “used cards in noida”, “used cars in chennai”.

WTF!!! I meant to search for “used cars or new car”. No problems anyways, since Google thinks I am not part of majority that would eventually type the terms suggested by it.

However, if you go to Google keywords, and search for keyword suggestions for “used cars” with India geography, you would find that the same terms appear as keyword suggestion that were thrown in Google search.

And no surprises: these keywords are the ones which come under “high competition” segment.

High competition segment keywords are costliest keywords to buy on Google Adwords.

If Google does not provide suggestion to users in Google search, there would be far more keywords, all of them combined fetching far less revenue to Google than the “high competition” keyword thrusted upon us.

Looking at this, why shouldn’t we assume that Google is trying to find ways of increasing prices of certain keywords, bringing more money the Biggest advertising agency on the globe?

Food for thought?

Symbian takes thousands down

.. or is it Android?

Nokia announced the biggest job cut in its history sending shock-waves to Finland’s economy.

Windows platform as an alternate of Symbian looks weird choice, but then it was a war between Google and Microsoft, and MS seems to have won the battle for now.

That being said, Nokia might have to include Android phones in its kitty in future. Today no company can ignore Android if it does not have a strong alternative in place.

The Indian Express

Once upon a time, were Lee-hesh known to exhibit unparalleled game of doubles tennis that was unconquerable by the contemporaries. In their era, they were a force to reckon with, they were a fear for the opponents. Now they have teamed up after a long time of 9 years, and after some warm up tourneys, they produced great result in Melbourne.

Continue reading The Indian Express

AgileNCR is back

Having participated in the last edition, I am eagerly awaiting this year’s conference. The announcement suggests it will be held in Feb’11.
This year organizers seem to have tightened their belt to make it the biggest Agile affair in India. Having partcicipated in some Agile conferences across India, I can surely say they have been able to attract the largest audience and some very good speakers.
They have launched their brand new website and are also active on Facebook, Twitter.
On adopting good promotion strategy this time, I would say Better late than never 🙂