The Agile Way of Life
Service providers have become too entrenched with the waterfall model and variations of the iterative waterfall model. However, the challenges of rolling out a new product and the need for translating product vision into a working product require a completely different mindset to product engineering.
Weekly sprints and frequent product releases have become the norm among our customers and we have recognized this from the day we started our operations. Symbioun has invested a lot in building a team that lives and breathes the agile development model.
Daily Standup Meetings, Test-driven development, Refactoring, Continuous Integration and Build Management, Multi-skilled team members are a way of life at Symbioun.
Agile Scrum Best Practices: People, Tools, Processes
Emphasis on ownership and team play
Ongoing training and agile lab sessions
Open Source project management tool for Agile Scrum
Dedicated product owners
Weekly Scrum of Scrums
Frequent Online Interactive Demo Sessions (IDEM)
Agile development can be successful only when every member of the team can step-up to take ownership of the task and at the same time, keeping in mind the overall project objectives. Symbioun has recognized this requirement. The recruitment process at Symbioun is aligned with this requirement. Ability to visualize the big picture and take educated risks in filling gaps in specifications are key evaluation parameters for all new hires at Symbioun.
Symbioun believes in periodic refresher courses and opportunities for agile teams to put in practice new concepts before applying them in customer engagements. All Symbiounites get an opportunity to participate in mock agile sessions, once every quarter, to specifically improve on areas identified for improvements based on project-end appraisals and customer feedback.
Symbioun has invested in building an Open Source based project management tool, ProTi, for managing all aspects of a project. This tool driven approach to project management allows customers to have complete visibility on project progress at stages of the project lifecycle. ProTi provides a robust platform for managing agile sprint cycles and provides an intuitive collaboration platform for globally distributed, agile teams
Every agile team at Symbioun has a dedicated product owner that plays the role of the customer. The role of a product owner is rotated among team members so that a majority of the agile team members gets exposed to the customer's vision for the product and agile team members can take ownership of the assigned tasks.
Weekly Scrum of Scrums is a standard practice at Symbioun to resolve cross-team issues and functional issues between projects or modules. This practice also helps in escalating obstacles between teams/projects for faster resolution. SOS meetings are attended by representatives from each of the several Scrum teams to track the progress of the individual teams, address issues faced during the week, and also to plan for the upcoming week.
The key to successful project engagements in an agile model is the constant involvement of customers and inputs from the customer engineering and product management teams. Symbioun facilitates such communication and involvement from the customer through weekly demo sessions that showcases the incremental progress made by the agile team.
