Psedo-societies and virtual relationships

I have always wondered about the paradoxical illusions of 'being social' that networking sites throw upon us. Gone past are  the days when people were being social 'in person'. Today is an age of virtual reality and many social networking companies  are making us realize about it. Today profiles make friendships and continue the virtual relationships by being connected  'digitally'. Strong bonds of digital relationships are being manufactured by likes, comments and sharing things over  internet. We want ourselves getting noticed and this virtual, pseudo-social nature of networking is the fastest way to do  it. Are we really being social? My view is a big NO.

Today's world is quite fast paced world. Here no one is allowed to take a stop or rest for a while. We are busy doing  something or the other incessantly and that's how one becomes a successful person. Most of us are performing an act as per the script written for us. Some do it as it is required, some do it exceptionally well. Day starts with yesterdays work and  ends with thoughts about tomorrow's. Where is the time for ourselves, our friends, our families, our passion? The time slots for all these are shrunk and one most peculiar thing that I have noticed is our definition of family is also getting  shrunk. We may have more than 500 friends on face book but our family ends at me, my wife/husband, my kids and that's it. The true relationships ask for commitments, compromises, understanding and sacrifices. These are all reciprocating virtues. If you possess them , you can experience it in return. Are we running away from these? Are we being too selfish?
Unfortunately, the answer is Yes. We don't need these virtues to make friends over internet. Your new friends are just one  click away. And that is the most easiest way to make friends and relationships. Isn't it?

There is one more important aspect to it - the need of association, the need of being noticed, the need of being  appreciated. With such granular families, such a miniscule sphere of influence, we need somebody, some forum to recognize  us so that we feel associated to some form of society. We want people to know where we went, what we cooked, what good  things are happening in our lives so that they extend their acknowledgement, wishes to us. This gives us oxygen to breathe in tomorrow's polluted environments. And why not? These are the only good things happening and we want to share this to somebody. That how number of likes on your recipe is increasing and that's how you tend to like some good snaps of your friend on face book.

One thing is true that the likes of face book has kept the sense of relationships alive over distances. You can get any sorts of updates(either natural or manufactured) of anybody you wish over internet. Internet has bridged the distances between continents but it has reduced our ability to make human bonds. This is an era of personalities. The pseudo social networks are about personalities but we still need human connection to get to know the true characters.

Festival SRT200

After SRT200 festival, all brand machines will start gearing up for a new unknown festival, which nobody knows at this moment and for which the GOD is yet to be identified. India is such a beautiful and holy country that I am sure the next re-incarnation of GOD is on its way. It's just the matter of revelation by Media, Politics and Corporate offices. SRT has done his magic, which has enthralled us for over two decades and now 'they' have sensed that it's time to retire this GOD. It could be the intuitive feeling for the GOD itself that he is falling to a position of mere human, which is quite reasonable. But the fact is, SRT has ended his international career finally. A speculation from critics, which had grown into a fierce dragon-like  fire spitting creature for past 3-4 years, has come to a reality and GOD has granted them their wish in a magnificent way.

Comparing Sachin with the GOD is not just coincident with his Cricketing abilities. He is an outstanding sportsperson, no doubt about it. But does that only make him GOD? Absolutely not. If you think, far more deep and intriguing notions are associated with this GOD phenomena, specifically to Indian context. In the country of festivals and GODs people are always looking for opportunities of celebrations, with a worthy reason associated to the event. A Savior, an endower is always raised above the human levels and treated as an angel or GOD who will answer the prayers and fulfill the wishes. Sachin has done so many remarkable things to serve our nation in the world of cricket, such a reverence is called for. He acted as the winning king of a religion, language and cast agnostic battlefield of sport. He has always been looked up to as an idol, on and off the field. He has established his legacy on the field by fiercely talking with his bat only, where many other 'humanlike' cricketers of his caliber indulged themselves in abusive game. He has never hurt anybody even off the field. I feel there is a strong connection between the growing middle and upper middle class economic entities and artist-middle-class roots of Sachin's family background. The GOD like behavior is revered by masses because the conduct that SRT has maintained throughout his career is quite dearer to hearts of millions. Since centuries our parents have taught us to  behave like this and Sachin perfectly managed to personify the exact lessons of 'middleclass ideology'. Neither he was involved in big controversy nor he tried to end any of such like match fixing. He was never known as an abusive figure on the field as probably he could not use bad words but let the bat do the business. This was not crafted and scripted but was an outcome of the upbringing that he has had in 'Sahitya Sahavas'. The innocence and simplicity are the two virtues that he has kept with him all along and these two have performed major role in having GOD like stature and veneration for an individual. As a testimony, the speech that he has given on his retirement day is one of the class act which touched millions of souls.

There is an observed tendency of Indians to look for a GOD like figure which can be looked up to in hard times. We need somebody as a pacemaker. We need somebody who will act as savior to us. When many of the things go wrong, we tend find one such Sachin, one such Amitabh, one such Bhimsen Joshi who act as an analgesic to our daily bruises life. Does that mean the roots of this GOD making tendency lie in our inabilities to fight with problems? Does that mean we always need a 'Maseha' to get us out of troubles? GODs and festivals are always good. They will give us strength and ability to believe in self. We need not submit ourselves to them. 

I am sure there will be a next 'GOD in making' somewhere in some industry with the scripts by Media, politics and corporate,  and those will be executed flawlessly with the same euphoria that we have witnessed on SRT200 festival.

5 things to avoid while being Agile!

Ron was quite disturbed since he got his music system. ‘It’s useless to me!’ He was yelling at salesman over the phone furiously. ‘How can you do that? What can I do with this system without the power cable and user manual? It’s of no value to me. This box is useless without accessories.” Salesman kept his calm and replied very humbly. “Sir, don’t worry. We know that. We will deliver the power cable after two weeks and user manual after three weeks.” Ron was shocked to hear that. So it was not a mistake but a planned delivery. He has no other way now but to wait till he gets his requirement completely done. One thing is clear; he will not go and buy any product from this company in future. Watch out for few words like ‘value’, ‘useless’, ‘completely done’. Is it about money or commitment or quality or requirement? No. The company failed to understand the ‘Value’ that the product offers to the customer. They understood the requirement, they delivered it on time but still it’s useless. It’s not completely done. The ‘Business Value delivered’ was ‘Zero’. I know this is a hypothetical case but just imagine what will happen if things like this happen with business IT!

Agile methodology focuses on ‘Business Value Delivered’. Instead of calculating and sizing the requirement in terms of time and money, agile makes you think in terms of business value that we are going to offer to the customer by delivering the product. Customer is more interested in ‘Value delivered’ than detailed project plans. In most of the software project management assignments we often try to plan and showcase the value invested in terms of time and money and nobody really thinks about the ‘business value’ delivered. One thing IT needs to understand that ‘Software projects are run for business and not for IT.’  WBS (Work Breakdown Structure), schedule, variances will speak about the effectiveness of the project management but not about business value. These things are also important but not the ‘only’ important things. Agile methodology helps us realize the business value offered and business value expected. Less the gap between two, more successful is the delivery. Remember, software delivery process is not going to change. “Analysis-Design-Development-testing-Support/maintenance” cycle will remain as it is till eternity. Agile makes it different in terms of packaging it together as a value which business finds useful. There is no point conducting agile ceremonies just for the sake of it. Most of the times managers tend to work traditional way under agile framework which may in fact hamper the ‘agility’ of the process.
I have listed 5 such phenomena which one should try and avoid while doing agile project management. I call it as 5 demons which threaten to be a part of your framework, structure and process, and you might not even realize that they are getting bigger and bigger to eat your system. They mark their presence in each part of the scrum life cycle from pre-plan, plan, execute, check and improve, and may produce unhealthy state of the deliverables. You don’t want them, right?

1. Break and Make
2. Unplanned Sprint Backlog
3. Zero Assessment
4. Partial Completion
5. Hours Calibration

Break and Make

As we all know, agile works on user stories and the ‘features’ which essentially are the requirements of the product. While drafting user stories one must ask this question. ‘Does this provide any value to customer?’ So adding a report to dashboard is definitely of some business value to customer, but preparing a test case document is not going to provide any kind of business value. It’s a part of tasks that a story may have. Most of the times,  we end up breaking the user story into its tasks and making individual task as separate user story for the sprint. This will create a picture of very busy product backlog with very effective sprint velocity. But if we see closely, these are the tasks with some story points which are not even stories at all. It is like cutting an apple into 5 pieces and booking them as 5 apples which actually makes just one apple out of it. This will indicate the false sprint backlog and false burn-down of the product backlog. This will take your project away from agile. These tasks are important but these are tasks essentially and not the requirements. We should not assign story point for tasks but hours estimation should be done. Agile does not stops at stories. We need to have estimated timeline for each task for a story. Detailed FBS (Feature Breakdown Structure) should be done with the tasks required for each feature (story). Don’t get confused and confuse your product owner between stories and tasks.

Unplanned Sprint Backlog

When a sprint is started, the scrum master should be aware of its team capacity, its sprint velocity and the items in product backlog. Product backlog is the source of the stories for a particular sprint. Team should be able to pick the tasks up from the product backlog into its sprint backlog and plan those for the sprint. If the sprint velocity for a team is 75 story points/sprint (three weeks), then the sprint should be planned to complete user stories worth 75 story points for that sprint. If this is not planned, we cannot identify the effectiveness of the sprint in terms of points planned vs. delivered points. There can be some challenges like intermediate injections, impediments, re-planning, reprioritization etc. but this will really tell you how your team is getting ‘burnt’. These causes should be highlighted with proper RCA (Root Cause Analysis) and product owner should be made aware of it. This will help you plan future sprints. If planning is not done and stories are taken up in the sprint backlog as and when they are injected, this will not help to baseline the team velocity at any point of time and we will not be able to provide any sort of forecast.  This will not help the project and team to be ‘agile’. Though agile does not focus on schedule variance and effort variance kind of metrics, team needs to make sure that ‘we deliver the committed as planned.’

Zero Assesment

Story points are not really related to the hours. When we estimate story points, we consider these three points: Uncertainty, Complexity and Efforts. All three are subject to change as we progress through sprint. It’s always advisable to spend some time to re-estimate the story points which is the basic step of assessment. This will help the team to give realistic estimations which will help stabilize the team velocity. If a story is estimated at 80 point because of lack of clarity, the re-planning/assessment should be done once the scope becomes certain and known to the team. If it’s continued as estimated, then we do not make justice to the business value of 80 point story. We produce false impression of value delivery. Assessments will help team to do the causal analysis of the variance by which team misses the sprint velocity or beats the sprint velocity.  Each ‘miss’ or ‘beat’ calls for velocity revision. A false ‘beat’ can lead to future misses and any ‘miss’ will not help the team to be a continuously improving team. Assessment can be done at the time of retrospection and we can assess our initial estimations against the work teams done. This will always help in future sprints, making the team an agile and continuously improving team.

Partial Completion 

Imagine the situation where you end up in a meeting without any evidence of the work that you did, hours that you spent and the output that you produced. I hate such type of situations. In agile if you don’t prepare you stories properly, you are going to end up facing either one of the above situation. A story should be a ‘unit requirement’ or a feature which cannot be broken further. Each story ideally should produce some outcome which possible could have the value worth its estimation (story point). If stories are not drafted properly, team starts working on it and it creates problem when we had to remove/change/postpone the requirement. Then a scrum master may end up closing partial points (e.g. 5 out 13 point story) and remove/change/postpone the requirement or close it without addressing the change or remove it keeping the work done unnoticed or create a story for the task completion and accommodate that in sprint backlog. This is going to produce false impression of the velocity and product owner/scrum master will never get to know the team’s true capacity and velocity. Such forced finishes will lead to velocity illusions from sprint to sprint.

Hours Calibration

Story point estimation of a user story is essentially a unit of measurement of the business value team delivers by implementing the story. Hours taken to complete this, is one of the factor which influences the business value, but it’s not the only one. Here we go totally wrong sometimes to map the story points to hours and start calibrating them on hours scale. If we want to map it, there is no point having story points altogether. Business requirements are different in nature and their fulfillment demands different set of skills, which are not same always. Teams who implement these requirements, are going to change and will not be same throughout. The people, who form the teams, have different skill levels and again, these are not same always. In such a changing environment, the hours estimation is not good enough to estimate the business value of a particular requirement and its implementation. If we take some real life examples, lifting a 25 kg box up to the height of 100 meters and cutting a wooden log are two totally different things. The time required for this depends upon the tools available and skill level and experience of the person who actually does this. Also the value delivered by the outcome stands significant in own its way. We just cannot compare these against time scale only. Hence the story estimation should not be done by comparing one requirement to other in terms of hours. Each story should be treated as separate story and this can be done effectively if we understand the business value that we deliver.

If you succeed to keep these demons at shore, I am sure your voyage will be agile enough to guide your passengers safely to the destination even in the environmental dynamics and disturbances!

Remainder

Have you ever though about remainders?. Nothing great in it but thought of sharing it.
Its about Negative number division.
What is 14/3 ? Its 4.667. with 4 as quotient and 2 remainder. Hence 14/3=4 plus 2/3.
Now what is -14/3 or 14/-3? It should be -4.667, but some interesting facts.
What could be the quotient for (-14/3) ... -4 ? and remainder...... -1.. ?
I don't think so.

If we go to the basics, If the number which is not completely divisible by divisor we get a greatest integer number which is completely divisible by divisor but lesser that dividend and subtract it from dividend. The subtraction in nothing but the remainder. In above example if the quotient is -4 then -12 should be lesser that -14. But Its NOT. Also the remainder of the division can not be negative. It is the one which 'remains' (negative can not remain....huhhhh..!!)

So... continuing with the same example, what if quotient is -5..? Lets see.
3*-5= -15 , which is less that -14. And remainder is 1...Hurrrrrayyyyyy...!
So -14/3 = -5 plus 1/3 which turns to -4.667
Also for 14/(-3), quotient is -4 and remainder is 2
Hence 14/(-3) = -4 remainder 2 = -4 plus 2/(-3) = -4.667

This is called is Aditya's theory of remainder..... :)))))) (Good Joke)