Ajay is Senior Director – Agile Transformation Coach and a Global Business Excellence Head at Xebia over 33+ years of extensive experience in Agile Scrum, project delivery, project / programme management & quality processes. He has been involved in driving and implementing and transformations of organizations using Agile and Quality and Process Improvement initiatives.
Ajay is responsible for the conducting Agile workshops based on Scrum, SAFe and Kanban along with PMP, Risk Management and General Change management elements
Ajay is accountable for global growth of Agile business of Xebia, excluding Netherlands and France, Ajay takes into account the strategy development, growth, developing and building competency, cross / up selling.
Providing high end consulting and training for implementation of Agile Practices (SCRUM, XP, SAFe and Lean, along with DevOps), Project & Programme management (PMP, PRINCE2, MSP)
Leads in development of new IP/ Product development, client relationship management and business development
Ajay is a regular speaker at various industry forums and an invited speaker to various organization to speak and express his views on the current trends and happenings in the industry.
Ajay is a regular blogger and blogs on off-topics related to Agile (though the focus in not Agile), but always on the softer side of Agile. His blogs are published at Scrum Alliance websites
Proven ability to present solution strategy and service offerings to the clients; participate in technical discussion, bidding activities, responding to RFPs/ RFQs and developing project proposals
Managed programmes / trainings for various types of industry such as Embedded SW development, BFSI Sector, Support functions like HR, Trainings and others
Ajay participates in community service by providing free mentoring program, which runs for about 12 weeks with an effort input of about 60 Hrs, this helps the aspiring Scrum Masters and Product Owners to develop the skills required for the industry
Additional Ajay is accountable for the Business Excellence of Global Xebia and ensuring all the required processes are defined, agreed and implemented and his team performs regular internal audits.
Session Details
Demystifying Definition of Done – A reality Check
DoD with 20+ items on the list. That’s too much to expect any team to complete for EVERY story in EVERY sprint, consistently. This can happen for a variety of reasons and it basically comes down to lack of trust
Quite often these lists reflect what QA or a Management THINKS are things developers do to create good software and quite often their perceptions are dated (older programming languages, haven’t evolved) and therefore the team is burdened with a long DoD list of the WRONG THINGS. A lot has changed about how we write software since Java/.Net in the late 1990’s. Unfortunately, in so many companies, DoD hasn’t kept pace.
In the initial sprints for certain teams, there is adherence to DoD. But as soon as work falls behind plan, someone declares forgiveness on DoD (code reviews are usually the first casualty) and the quality of the work starts to drop.
Some organizations adopt a weak or low bar for their DoD. Some focus on documentation and not on the qualities and practices that make great software. Some organizations don’t want to make the developer “feel bad” so give them credit for incomplete software that is barely unit tested. All of these situations result in poorly written code that often fails during later stages.
All too often when asked to see a team’s DoD someone pulls out an Excel spreadsheet on their laptop. Or a PPT slide with tiny font or goes on for several slides. When asked how these are tracked, one would get answers that range from “The Scrum Masters know” to (my personal pet peeve) “We create a template story with each item in DoD as a task” (must then be manually closed by a hapless ScrumMaster because the team members refuse to do that much administrative work).
This talk explores on the world of DoR and DoD and puts in a color that would help meeting the quality standards and upgrading the DoD as we mature along the way