 services company. And actually I'm quite surprised that my lightning talk got accepted because I just saw it yesterday and I just submitted a proposal. But what I wanted to talk today is a little bit about culture, values and the way people look at agile as you move from like one country to another. I've been working for Shlumbashay for about eight years now and you know it's a relatively short time for people to like move between countries and I've had like a nice opportunity actually to be in like three countries slash continents. So sort of I thought it might be good to talk a little bit about culture and way people look at things in one place as a post to another. So I started off at Shlumbashay in Houston in the US and the thing is that over there I started off like I went to grad school in the US so after I finished off college I joined Shlumbashay and I found that you know a bunch of us joined the company together and always I find that you know new comers or freshers as they say in the companies they're generally little I mean in in the US I found that people are really cocky and kind of also confident about what they want to do and you know what they can bring on to the table into the company and stuff like that. Whereas the next country I moved to like in Germany people are a little more guarded you know so we had a lot more youngsters coming in and there they guarded they don't really like an engineering grad will not really right off the bat will not tell you what his or her skills are and they're more guarded and in India I find that can you hear me yeah and in India I find that people are in fact a little bit more guarded you know so you really need to go and like tease out things from them and say you know you have to earn their trust before they actually come in you know start selling themselves after you've you know been in the company and the other thing about sharing you know that's another thing which I saw about amongst the companies I mean about amongst the different countries the US I found people are generally very very into like sharing and maybe it's just the way the you know the culture that there is they're really into like you know having a lot of lunch and learns and you know getting across to different teams talking and communicating and stuff like that. In Germany I found that people don't really talk as much and only I mean there's no small talk so like like I remember in the US where you know your coffee room conversations were so good to like you know talk about a new idea or you know just talk it out with somebody from another team it was so accessible to do stuff like that but in Germany I found that it was people just generally don't actually number one there's no small talk you know so that took some time so there's usually people don't do small talk so you have to go across and talk to people and of course once you start talking this there's a lot of nice ideas that you can learn. In India I find it's somewhere in between there are some people who are sort of open to sharing some people not so much and there's I guess in some other talk I saw there's also this whole hierarchy and organization and how many years you've been in the company and you know there's that little bit of people are scared to come and talk whereas in the US which I found was like a fresher would you know I mean zero years in the company he'll go and talk to like I was one of them I went and spoke to the software architect like on my first day of the job and said I think your software architecture document has got some serious flaws and obviously I mean I mean but I was able to do that whereas in India I can imagine I mean I don't really imagine anybody would come and do that and in Germany it's again it's kind of mixed maybe there are some guys who are really smart they would probably come and say it but again everybody's a little guarded and lastly yeah another thing is about this the sharing thing you know so a lot of places in all these three countries I found that we used to have this concept which I guess is there in other companies as well as you have this concept of doing a lunch and learn or some kind of group discussion on a new topic and in in the US it was like it's really cool everybody would want to jump on to it you also get a free lunch from the company so a lot of people are queuing up in India also I guess the free lunch and also apart from the fact that you want to learn but in Germany what I found very very funny was that when I when I be actually in Germany the company that was actually bought over by Schlumberger so you know a couple of us were transferred over from the US so that we would you know smoothen the transition and stuff so when we did this lunch and turn there actually a couple of them were kind of I think we organized this and they were just about like five or six people who turned up and I found that really strange and and then somebody from one of my friends one of my lunch friends told me that actually some people were offended by the fact that we were doing a lunch and learn and I was shocked because I was like what my thought was cool thing you get to learn a new topic and it's really nice and you know can interact with people on something other than what you work on daily and then I was told that people there think that if you if the company is making you work during your lunch time that's actually going into their personal space so so that kind of thing so this is like these few experiences that I wanted to share and all of this actually makes quite a bit of difference when you're trying to go agile I think so kind of makes your success really differs based on the continent and yeah the geographical location so yeah thanks hello everyone my name is Amit Deshpande I'm from software AG I'm a senior manager out there and what I wanted to talk today is basically our experiences with agile the scrum and Kanban methodologies and where we are at this point so we adopted the agile scrum methodologies about four years back so we were told to follow scrum pretty much and see how it goes so it's been experimental all through I would say and I wanted to just give a brief experience of where we started and where we are so when we started with scrum we were told that well there's going to be a process we have to follow go out to divide your work into sprints obviously and there's going to be a planning session go ahead and make sure that you're doing your stand-ups see where we are each day and then do a demo towards the end of each sprint and make sure that it's getting accepted by the product owners and then finally follow up with the retrospective and see what we can improve on continuously so that was great I mean dividing our work and making sure that we are delivering something towards end of every sprint but then there is a commitment aspect which is involved in each sprint you've got to deliver something you've got a plan and you've got to make sure that it's getting done and if it is not done then the sprint is kind of considered a failure at least that's how the concept was four years back and failing in a sprint was not considered a great thing so most teams would start and then they would find that they are failing sprint after sprint and then we said well let's do a root cause and see what's going on some some of them said well it's going for the features that we've been given that we're able to pick up but then there are these requests coming out of nowhere and these are from management or from the customers and they are saying well you got to pick this up and that is not allowing us to finish our sprints that's demoralizing basically saying that failing fail is a bad word right I mean so we said well let's look at alternatives and then said let's go to Kanban how does it sound well this Kanban where you have a prioritized list you can pick items from the queue and you limit your work in progress and get it done well if there is distraction coming in that's okay you pick up that becomes a high priority action item and you basically get that done so we tried to adopt that as well but then we found it to be loosely coupled very loosely coupled with what we have to do and then we said well why don't we do something else we said well the commitment was a problem and Kanban doesn't have that so we'll do something called a scram scrum ban I think some of you would be aware of this term so we are now going ahead with scrum ban and it's been going pretty fine basically we are having planning sessions see where we are what we've got accomplished and what's there in our prioritized list and keep moving on and there's no restriction basically on what item gets picked in each sprint and at the same time if there is a distraction for example a customer commitment then you basically pick that item so that's that's the experience I wanted to share so we are at scrum ban at this point and I know that there are a few talks going on and I would be interested in hearing if possible what others are facing around the methodologies all right thank you for this lot I would like to say that if you are interested in speaking and doing some lightning talks there is a form on the agile India website 2014.azileindia.org submit and then we'll slot again for tomorrow we'll pick more speakers and stuff like that the idea here is to get grassroots level like how you are feeling about implementing agile what are your experiences been and things like that so that more people learn from different diverse set of practitioners all right this is the last talk for this particular slot. Good afternoon everyone my name is Tarang Bakshi I work for ThoughtWorks as a project manager and a business analyst so my topic if the screen comes up is actually much narrower than the previous two speakers I'm going to be talking about no estimates in the real world I guess this sort of thing has to happen right there's always technical difficulties at every technical point okay so early in 2013 the software geek corner of Twitter was a buzz with this this idea of no estimates there were a lot of heated debates sort of people arguing that you shouldn't estimate it's harmful others arguing that people saying that were out of their minds so I thought well it's an interesting topic because in the agile world we've got you know because we do like to talk about estimation a lot and you know so there's more blabber on estimation here but the reason this topic got me interested was that you know we I hate estimation I think it's a waste of time particularly the upfront estimation that happens to forecast you know timelines for a project and the cost for a project so so if there is something out there if there are ideas out there can get then get us from this notion more estimates to no estimates hey you know what I'm all ears I want to hear what it's all about so so you know just you know so for those unfamiliar with with this idea of no estimates there was a I'll talk about the central premise the central premise here is that okay the central premise is that for any decisions related to software you should not use estimates instead you start building the application or the thing that you are trying to develop and start incrementally building towards and getting towards the end outcome so that's the core of the argument but you know I mean it doesn't I don't know how much for us at least for those of us in the room you know he's had really practical in the real world there were even suggestions from some of the proponents saying that if you're working for a client and the client says give me estimates think about whether you really want to work for them so I work for a consulting company right I mean we we can survive if we tell customers hey just let us come in we can't tell you how much is gonna cost how much time it will take let us start building stuff so there needed to be something in the real world that they can actually work so you know so this got me thinking so okay so so let's step back right why do why are we actually doing estimates it's either to you know answer a question like okay how much is it gonna cost how much time is it gonna take so if that's what we're trying to do but that's not the real question right nobody really cares just for the sake of it how much is gonna cost and how much is gonna take there are some decisions underlying decisions that those things are informing so decisions like oh how much budget do I need to go out my manager for should I build this or should I buy an off-the-shelf product should I look to replace an existing product or should I fix it right there are some real you know hard hard decisions that have to be made so you're trying to inform these decisions by the act of trying to do some estimates but here is where where we run into trouble right because the notion of estimation as it stands today even on a lot of agile projects stems from the 1990s world that Martin was talking about earlier today of plan driven estimates so it's looked as a tool for for you know for predicting a lot of things well up in advance saying oh let's predict the next 12 months what does it look like let's put some you know estimates on 300 stories and add them all up and that will tell us what what next 12 months will look like or if the problem is that it's you know it's also taken as and as if I get an estimate from my vendor or from my IT team it means that I have a commitment so it's replacing the trust that you would have to with the from the delivery team with some numbers saying oh you guys said this will take three months what do you mean it's gonna take four and a half now right another common problem you know with with this approach that we're taking of estimation is that you know there's often a misconception that the more time you spend doing estimates in more detail the more accurate your estimates will be so I call that the slope of good hope right it doesn't doesn't slope in that direction at all so these are some of the challenges with this approach so so so what should we do right if we if we do have to provide an estimate for whatever for for responding to an RFP or to convince you know someone that budget is needed what are some alternatives out there so these are just some ideas I won't be able to get into any level of detail into some of these but just some things I've I've tried or I've seen colleagues try so so one one thing you could do and I wish I could actually see the next slide because yeah so so one thing we've we've tried to do it then actually I'm gonna focus on alternatives to just the forecasting part of estimation there's an aspect around tracking you know this estimation that you do at a sprint level I'm not gonna talk about I'm just gonna talk about for forecasting what are some possible alternatives out there to the more traditional ways so the first one is really you know actually even deciding should you do an estimate if it looks like your conversation has started to go down a path where oh I need this in this much time I need all of this scope there is no room for negotiation and I have only this much money then actually trying to go ahead an estimate is is going to solve the wrong problem you're going to get the conversation in a direction that it doesn't need to go so that's the first step so maybe you need to stop and say sorry let's not talk about estimation something else to talk about as an alternate the second thing you could do is what's the real constraint typically people are asking for time and money but what's the real constraint so if you're building an app for the US Open well the real constraint that it needs to live before the actual US Open happens right it's not so much about how many dollars are available or how much you know how much time a feature is going to take it's that it's the timeline in which something needs to go there so maybe you need to talk about estimate for the real constraint rather than the traditional way of you know how many story points and how many how many hours something will take a related idea is to actually say instead of telling you how long some set of features will take maybe for your timeline constraint we can talk about scope confidence ranges so if you know the priority order in which you're going to do this maybe we can say hey you know what for the top five items we think is very likely it will make it the next five maybe it will make it but we're not sure we'll find out as we go along and these are not likely to make it for the constraints that you have you know the yet and yet another thing I've seen is we've gone to clients and we've said you know what from what we understand at the start of the project there are far too many unknowns we can't give you an estimate but we can tell you how long it will take to uncover some of these unknowns so we can tell you whether it'll take us five days ten days three weeks five weeks so maybe you provide that and you start with that and and try to do that instead of trying to just crystal ball a number that doesn't make sense and yet another option is maybe forecast for smaller pieces so instead of the entire set of the project you maybe do a now next later and say okay for now which are a small set of things that we can be delivered in two or three months we can give you some more specific estimates next is in a range of weeks and later is maybe in months or not even estimated at all but you know all of these are of course a few different options but you know I don't think any of them is really a silver bullet so I think that conundrum is going to continue right when there's there's big upfront budgeting cycles when when release cycles are still you know 12 to 16 or 18 months long this conundrum is going to continue and I think you know as if any of you have any ideas that you've heard of just reach out to me after after this and I'd love to hear what your experiences are yeah so that's it if you have more ideas put more proposals for lightning talks for tomorrow and day after that thank you