Gunjan Doshi

I have been helping this client since March of this year. Yesterday, they achieved a major milestone - production launch. I think it is ok to classify a system going live on budget, time and within scope as a success story.
We all know about the last minute jobs and the ensuing stress, when the system goes live for the first time. However, this one had a very different feel to it - there was no anxiety at all. The system went live as per schedule and there were no hiccups. It just seemed like any other day at work.
How did that happen? Well, for the past few weeks, we have been regularly deploying the system into a simulated production environment and testing the hell out of it. The production manager was so confident of the success that during the release, she was in a meeting for a totally unrelated project.

It is hard to single out few practices, as the interplay among them is what makes Agile so successful. However, here are few practices that have been instrumental to this milestone:
1. First, without a fully participating whole team, this milestone would have eluded us by stretch.
2. Nothing teaches more than a system in production. So, deploy continuously. We put an infrastructure in place, which made it very easy to deploy the system without any pains. The team aggressively practiced daily deployment.
3. In the past few days of aggressive testing, the team realized the power of baby-steps and unit-tests. It prevented some last-minute sneaky errors that would have otherwise slipped through.
4. We always negotiated on scope, not on price or quality. Our industry is plagued with scenarios, where the date, scope, budget get riveted letting the most subtle parameter - quality suffer. Quality is always easy to compromise compared to scope, as it does not have an immediate observable impact. We never let this happen.
5. For fixing defects, we diligently followed the root-cause analysis approach as outlined in the second edition of Extreme Programming Explained. Root-cause analysis is a disciplined approach to fixing defects and uncovering the underlying cause of the defect. To summarize root-cause analysis:
a. First write a desired failing test, that if present, would have prevented the defect from happening in the first place.
b. Follow the red-green-refactor rhythm and make the test green.
c. Integrate & retrospect
On the other fronts, I have also started coaching a different client in helping them adopt agility. They are in the starting stages. Two weeks ago, I facilitated a training session for the executive team and the PMO office.
I am also preparing a presentation titled “Let it fail, who cares”. I just finished reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The thoughts have not yet settled in, so no comments on the book yet.

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