Making better products

Microsoft is finally into the agile bandwagon. They recently announced the eScrum tool.

eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. It provides multiple ways to interact with your Scrum project: eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, it provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports with built-in context sensitive help.

This was a tool which Microsoft has apparently been using internally, they put it up on the web on June 12, so looks like they want to get feedback from users and then commercialize it.

Here are some screenshots.

In continuation to my previous post, I got requests from friends to learn more on agile and for good references on agile on the net. So here goes.

1. Martin Fowler’s blog - Of course, this is my favorite and I have loved reading Martin’s blog which is very informative but at the same time very simple and easily understandable by any one.
2. Wikipedia - The best place to start if you have no clue on agile.
3. The agile alliance web site.

The following are a collection of good books which have been suggested by people in no particular oder.

Following books are found to be good by many readers

1. Agile and Iterative Development a managers guide by Craig Larman
2. Agile Project Management by Ken Schwaber
3. Refactoring by Martin Fowler
4. Working with legacy code by Michael Feathers
5. Agile Estimation and planning by Mike Cohn
6. Agile Project Management by Jim Highsmith
7. Crystal Clear by Alistair Cockburn

If you think that a good book can be added to the list, drop a comment.

Hope this helps.

Having worked on a couple of projects on agile, and a distributed agile between the client’s team and our team, I have started liking this approach and really appreciate the fact that it can provide really great bsuiness value to the customer especially in terms of being able to tackle changing requirements.

The following are some of the reasons how agile made life really easy for our team and why I think it changed the way we worked and looked at the process of building a product using the agile methodology.

• Continuous integration using CruiseControl which avoided last minute integration issues.
• Doing daily status calls and stand up meetings, which ensured that everyone in the team knows what’s going on and enabling a PM/PL to know the current status of the project at any point of time.
• Creating sprint backlogs and burndown charts - which enabled the team to focus on the tasks ahead for the week
• Iteration planning which enables to prioritize the features that are needed in every iteration.
• Using a collaborative platform like wikis/portals where all the relevant information is present at a one glance and any one joining the team newly had very less ramp up time.
• We also found that having some people from our team to work out from the client’s loaction in order to make communication easier and for us to understand the client’s working environment better.
• Having builds on a daily basis enabled us to get quick and frequent feedback from the client and this enabled us to deliver the best possible product to matc h the client’s requirements.

Overall, I think it was a reallly good experience working on agile, and the best part was doing it distributed between the client and our team, as this increases complexity and brings in more challenges.