Management

Every «hype» thing or event has a certain regularity: the more people talk about it, the less they really know about it. Scrum is not an exception. You may find hundreds of relevant articles and IT news, where it may seem that there is only one best Agile methodology and this is Scrum. A large Agile family contains various powerful methodologies and Scrum is not the sole system of implementing Agile principles. However, this methodology is still actively used all over the world.

People go mad about Scrum: many IT blogs write about it, many practical courses promise to teach all Scrum features, many companies want to see a working experience with Scrum in CVs, and so on. Scrum conquers them all. In this post, we define why.

Is it always easy for you to prioritize the tasks of the huge project? What if five or more tasks have the main priority and urgency?

Experienced project managers and product owners know that intuition is not enough in such cases. In order to avoid missing deadlines, today, managers are able to apply useful methodologies for determining priorities, as well as modern tools that help to visualize data and not miss anything in their workflows.

Given: A company which uses the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to scale Agile development across the organization; 10 development teams combined into one big team (Agile Release Train, according to SAFe terminology) to deliver a common product; the need for a two-day quarterly planning (PI Planning) to determine the work plan of IT teams for the next 3 months *; three development offices with the distance between the most remote ones exceeding 6 thousand kilometers and corresponding working time difference of 5 hours; previous planning experience which implied usage of analogue boards / whiteboards / highlighters / sticky notes and respective physical presence of all key employees in the same room.

* This heavyweight construct “The work plan of IT teams for the next 3 months” threatens to increase the size of the text significantly, so hereinafter I’m going to replace it with “the commitment”. Accordingly, to draw up and adopt a work plan will be “to commit”.

Why do we need this?

1) Fatigue with analog methods of work. While spaceships are plowing the Space, and Elon Musk is boring his tunnels, we, the IT guys, have been persistently writing with highlighters on sticky notes sticking them on the boards — there is really some kind of dissonance in this, isn’t there? That’s what our commitment looked like a while ago:

5 tips to help you achieve your desired goal. Of course, it is not necessary to carry them all out and in the order indicated. However, it is important not only to read them and forget, but try to apply them in your life.

Here is tree with 3 levels to start your journey as web developer.

This is the final part of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous part here). Now I’m going to talk about one more type of outages and the conclusions we made about them, how we modified the development process, what automation we introduced.

Originally article was posted here — 7 tips & tricks on how to deal with remote teams

A number of both large corporations and small companies having almost no staff is increasing. This is the impulse of new times that many call “uberization”. The phenomenon was named after Uber — one of the largest public-transportation companies whose drivers all are independent entrepreneurs aka freelancers. Such a structure allows Uber to work all over the planet through operating remote teams of drivers in dozens of cities simultaneously.

1. Transporting prototypes

The idea of the DO-RA project originated in March 2011 after a nuclear disaster on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. This gadget was conceived as a personal dosimeter/radiometer working with eponymous software (DO-RA.Soft) on mobile platforms (iOS, Android, WP) as well as on desktop platforms—Windows/Linux/MacOS.

At the end of 2017, a tourist from China brought in his backpack ten long-awaited prototypes from the DO-RA.Q test batch. They were manufactured in China based on our design documents and then transported from Shenzhen to Moscow. By the way, the development of design documents was assigned to the largest Design Centre in Eastern Europe—the PROMWAD company. The documents were clear and plain—prepared in IPC format and written in proper English—to enable the automated production of electronic devices in a foreign country.

This is the next article of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous parts here: part 1, part 2, part 3). In further parts, I’ll talk about the accidents and outages in detail.

1. Bad release: database overload

Let me begin with a specific example of this type of outage. We deployed an optimization: added USE INDEX in an SQL query; during testing as well as in production, it sped up short queries, but the long ones — slowed down. The long queries slowdown was only noticed in production. As a result, a lot of long parallel queries caused the database to be down for an hour. We thoroughly studied the way USE INDEX worked; we described it in the Do’s and Dont’s file and warned the engineers against the incorrect usage. We also analyzed the query and realized that it retrieves mostly historical data and, therefore, can be run on a separate replica for historical requests. Even if this replica goes down due to an overload, the business will keep running.

A roadmap is an important work tool for a product manager. In this article, we will define the stages of creating a roadmap and learn about services for creating the ideal roadmap.

A coding bootcamp is a program of technical training teaching the programming skills that employers are looking for. Coding bootcamps allow students with low skills to concentrate on the most significant coding aspects and apply their new coding skills to solve real-world problems.

The goal of many bootcamp coding attendants is to move into a web development career. They do this by learning to build applications at a professional level – providing the foundation they need to build applications that are ready for production and demonstrating the skills they have to add real value to a potential employer.

Disclaimer: This is a translation of an article. All rights belongs to author of original article and Miro company.

I'm a QA Engineer in Miro. Let me tell about our experiment of transferring partially testing tasks to developers and of transforming Test Engineer role into QA (Quality assurance).

First briefly about our development process. We have daily releases for client side and 3 to 5 weekly releases of server side. Team have 60+ people spitted onto 10 Functional Scrum Teams.

I'm working in Integration team. Our tasks are:

• Integration of our service into external products
• Integration of external products into our service
  For example we have integrated Jira. Jira Cards — visual representation of tasks so it's useful to work with tasks not opening Jira at all.
  
  

How the experiment starts

All starts with trivial issue. When someone of Test Engineers had sick leave then team performance was degraded significantly. Team was continued working on tasks. However when code was reached testing phase task was hold on. As a result new functionality didn't reach production in time.

Going onto vacation by Test Engineer is a more complex story. He/she needs to find another Test Engineer who ready to take extra tasks and conduct knowledge sharing. Going onto vacation by two Test Engineers at the sane time is not an applicable luxury.

This is the next article of the series describing how we’re increasing our service availability in Citymobil (you can read the previous parts here and here). In further parts, I’ll talk about the accidents and outages in detail. But first let me highlight something I should’ve talked about in the first article but didn’t. I found out about it from my readers’ feedback. This article gives me a chance to fix this annoying shortcoming.

Some companies have many managers and team leaders in their staff, because they need people with management skills. What characteristics should an ordinary employee have in order to become a good manager? Much depends on the purpose of the company, its scope and market characteristics.

This is a second article out of a series «Citymobil — a manual for improving availability amid business growth for startups». You can read the first part here. Let’s continue to talk about the way we managed to improve the availability of Citymobil services. In the first article, we learned how to count the lost trips. Ok, we are counting them. What now? Now that we are equipped with an understandable tool to measure the lost trips, we can move to the most interesting part — how do we decrease losses? Without slowing down our current growth! Since it seemed to us that the lion’s share of technical problems causing the trips loss had something to do with the backend, we decided to turn our attention to the backend development process first. Jumping ahead of myself, I’m going to say that we were right — the backend became the main site of the battle for the lost trips.

The modern projects on the optimization and the automation of many business processes, assume, as a rule, that the first step will be the analysis of the large amount of the client’s documents. The purpose of it is the modelling the business processes “as-is” in a very tight schedule. The list of the analyzed documents includes normative legal acts, industry standards, SCRUM user stories, regulations, technical specifications and other corporate documents.

The analyst for the project faces a rather time-consuming task which is at the same time a routine one as well. It doesn’t have many means of automation at present. According to the analysis of modern means of business process modelling, even such well-known applications on the market as Enterprise Architect, ARIS, Bizagi Modeler do not have any support mechanisms for business process model building in their text description.

This article is focused on the BPMN model extraction from the document.

What is DevOps and Why is it important?

DevOps is the combination of Development teams and Operation teams in order to create a business with traditional software development practices. DevOps gaining popularity at a rapid pace. Let's see how DevOps helps the delivery of Software products.

When the development and operational teams are inseparable silos, it makes development life cycles longer due to lack of communication and cooperation between two teams. By merging those two we can make software development shorter cycles.

DevOps is not a profession. It's culture. It builds teams and makes engineers work for a common goal rather than individual performances. This leads to better collaboration and increased efficiency.

More importantly, DevOps reduces rollback failures, Rollbacks and give time to recover. The main characteristic of DevOps. This helps to find bugs and failures quickly giving rise to rectify bugs or recover from failures.

In this first part of an article series «Citymobil — a manual for improving availability amid business growth for startups» I’m going to break down the way we managed to dramatically scale up the availability of Citymobil services. The article opens with the story about our business, our task, the reason for this task to increase the availability emerged and limitations. Citymobil is a rapid-growing taxi aggregator. In 2018, it increased by more than 15 times in terms of number of successfully completed trips. Some months showed 50% increase compared with the previous month.

The business grew like a weed in every direction (it still does): there was an increase in server load, team size and number of deployments. At the same time the new threats to service availability emerged. The company faced a task of the most importance — how to increase availability without compromising company growth. In this article, I’ll talk about the way we managed to solve this task in a relatively short time.

Accumulating technical debt may lead your company to a crisis. But it may also become a powerful driver of massive process changes and help with engineering practices adoptions. I'll tell you about it on my own example.

The last decades the world economy regularly falls into this vortex of financial crises that have affected each country. It almost led to the collapse of the existing financial system, due to this fact, experts in mathematical and economic modelling have become to use methods for controlling the losses of the asset and portfolio in the financial world (Lechner, L. A., and Ovaert, T. C. (2010). There is an increasing trend towards mathematical modelling of an economic process to predict the market behaviour and an assessment of its sustainability (ibid). Having without necessary attention to control and assess properly threats, everybody understands that it is able to trigger tremendous cost in the development of the organisation or even go bankrupt.

Value at Risk (VaR) has eventually been a regular approach to catch the risk among institutions in the finance sector and its regulator (Engle, R., and Manganelli S., 2004). The model is originally applied to estimate the loss value in the investment portfolio within a given period of time as well as at a given probability of occurrence. Besides the fact of using VaR in the financial sector, there are a lot of examples of estimation of value at risk in different area such as anticipating the medical staff to develop the healthcare resource management Zinouri, N. (2016). Despite its applied primitiveness in a real experiment, the model consists of drawbacks in evaluation, (ibid).

The goal of the report is a description of the existing VaR model including one of its upgrade versions, namely, Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR). In the next section and section 3, the evaluation algorithm and testing of the model are explained. For a vivid illustration, the expected loss is estimated on the asset of one of the Kazakhstani company trading in the financial stock exchange market in a long time period. The final sections 4 and 5 discuss and demonstrate the findings of the research work.