Brightmoon Consulting & Training

This video shows  a simple 5-steps framework to learn new thing fast.

1. Decide what you want (key performance level)
   
2. Deconstruct the skills required and practice the most important one
   
3. Research the skill just-enough to practice it
   
4. Eliminate barriers of practice
   
5. Pre-commit to have at least 20 hours of practice
   

Watch the full video to find out more. Have fun learning the new learning approach.

Agile methods recognizes and readily enables a project or development team to build in quality in their software product. It has introduced many methods to further improve the software development experience. Pair programming is one such method.

 It basically means 2 persons will work on the same piece of software at one time.  An extra set of eyes and brain will surely help. They will help to identify each others' blind spots. They can be instant discussion partners for difficult and complex code.

It may take a while for new comers to productively bring this into practice, may be a few iterations. But once the team becomes used to it, the productivity gain may exceed the cost of having 2 persons working on the same code.

Code reviews can be greatly reduced or totally eliminated. Testing effort may be reduced as well as it is expected the pair- programmers have built a good piece of module or software.
 
Other side effects of practicing pair programming are each other can learn one or things from his/her partner. And guess what ?? If one programmer became unavailable due to any reason (has to be assigned to a higher priority project or leaves the company), the other person can still continue with almost no effect to project schedule !!

Agile software development means that :-

1. All stakeholders accept the fact that all requirements to meet strategic demand & roadmap cannot be fully and clearly understood upfront. These requirements will change and project team especially developers should anticipate and welcome the change as the project progresses.

2. There will be many short releases on weekly/bi-weekly/monthly of small increments (working software features or modules). The short cycle and small increments forces project team and customer to prioritize most valuable/important features, thus enables customers to start using the system much earlier. It also ensures money is spent first on the most important features thus reduces financial risk in case project comes to an abrupt end. The shorter release cycles enables faster customer feedback on the features and greatly reduces risk of misunderstood requirement. The cycle will repeat until all requirements are implemented (all backlogs are cleared).

3. There will be continuous integration and testing at each cycle. Continuous integration and testing forces the increments to fully comply with systems requirements thus reduces any technical risk.

4. Customers have active role to ensure successful completion of the project (successful development and delivery of the software). This is because there will be higher visibility throughout the project. Any deviation can be quickly corrected. Deviation risk is limited to one cycle time whatever it may be weekly/bi-weekly/monthly.

If you need further clarification on agile software development can be adopted by your organization or how it can benefit you, do connect with us.

Many organizations are good at planning. They are equally good at implementing their plan. Unfortunately the process ends there for most organizations. They are often busy and occupied with the current work and issues that they don't usually check what they are doing and how they are doing them. In other words, they hardly do audit on the activities.

Audit are important as it will uncover mismatches between what is documented with what is actually being done. It will help to uncover the deviation between what is thought to be happening or out to happen with what is actually happening. Most of the time, the deviation is intentional. The original (documented) process may be not practical or relevant anymore so the guys down there (implementers) will modify and tweak the process to suit their work.

A good audit process will also be able to gather what are the deviation and why they occur. It will help to solicit the pain points. It will also provide a relevant recommendation as to how those mismatched can be addressed.

It is good that all processes, procedures, templates and tools are continuously reviewed and improved every 3 to 6 months. if you need any help to perform audit for your project management and software development activities, please connect with us.