ShriKant's Home

Welcome to the gateway of my creative world!

Please visit my profile to take a look at professional credentials and visit "Swadhyay with Shri" blog for literature, philosophy and self development related blogs. Though I am technical guy by heart, I don't think I can limit myself with its boundary as I have been actively involved in training, sales, Agile proejct management, people-management, mentoring, philosophy and literature.

Agile, Scrum, XP

Building Soft Skills of Agile Team – Key to Real Success: It's easy to work in isolation as nobody bothers you. It still works when you work in cubicle like structures where you speak when you really need to. People need to come to your cubicle to reach you. I may want to communicate through emails even though I know you are sitting just next to [...]
How to break requirements into user-stories: It's easy to talk in terms of the user-stories but when it comes to create them, it may be a daunting task to break features into smaller functional chunks. This is not very specific to Agile only as the same can be practised in Waterfall projects too. There it helps in identifying and prioritising the [...]
When KISS Backfires: I started working in software projects when C++ was the only highly popular programming language. There used to be a lot of focus in writing optimal programs or routines. So though the applications were optimal, they suffered from Waterfall mindset of thinking distant future nobody was clear on - "What if...in future...". Design patterns and [...]
Agile Team Dynamics : Developers vs Testers/Designers: Yesterday I had a conversations with one of my colleagues Prakash who works as a tester in an Agile project. “So how is it going on?”, I asked. Prakash took a deep breath and said, “Umm...workwise I think I am getting more confident on the application functionality now. However in one of our retrospectives I [...]
The Need of Agile Architect in Scrum Team: Nobody can question if you implement the Agile practices in Waterfall projects. If you talk about XP practices in general, they are not really specific about any methodology. Pair-programming, CI, TDD etc all make sense in any methodology. However one of the key difference is – Waterfall doesn’t bound you in anything. It also doesn’t [...]

Agile Testing

Agile Team Dynamics : Developers vs Testers/Designers: Yesterday I had a conversations with one of my colleagues Prakash who works as a tester in an Agile project. “So how is it going on?”, I asked. Prakash took a deep breath and said, “Umm...workwise I think I am getting more confident on the application functionality now. However in one of our retrospectives I [...]
Agile Testing – Incremental Functional Test Approach: Software development is all about incremental functional development. However we find a great impedance mismatch between development and testing synchronization. Though we talk about continuous integration and verification, most of the user stories come for verification only at the end of sprint which pose a major challenge in front of the testers just because of [...]
Efficacy of Automated Acceptance Testing: Some Practical Facts: These days there is good amount of debate on the efficacy of the automated acceptance tests. Many have started believing that current way of acceptance testing is a waste as it doesn't provide you the relevant ROI as you'd expect from it. People have provided some alternatives also, but to me they look very subjective [...]

Tech Blogs

QuickTip : Github Multiple Accounts Access with ssh: Let's say we have two github accounts named "shrikant-home" and "shrikant-work". I would like to access both accounts from ssh. I hope you have already created public and private keys for both github accounts and added in the ssh settings as mentioned at http://help.github.com/mac-set-up-git/ Now create a file named ~/.ssh/config file and make following entries [...]
QuickTip : Editing Gradle Scripts with Textmate: You need to associate '.gradle' extension with groovy as follows: First if not done already, install groovy textmate bundle from http://groovy.codehaus.org/TextMate In Textmate, open "Bundles --> Bundle Editor --> Edit Languages --> Groovy" and change as follows: to In order to run gradle scripts from Textmate use bundle from https://github.com/alkemist/gradle.tmbundle
Building Soft Skills of Agile Team – Key to Real Success: It's easy to work in isolation as nobody bothers you. It still works when you work in cubicle like structures where you speak when you really need to. People need to come to your cubicle to reach you. I may want to communicate through emails even though I know you are sitting just next to [...]
How to break requirements into user-stories: It's easy to talk in terms of the user-stories but when it comes to create them, it may be a daunting task to break features into smaller functional chunks. This is not very specific to Agile only as the same can be practised in Waterfall projects too. There it helps in identifying and prioritising the [...]
eclipse-to-maven : Printing Dependency Tree of Eclipse projects or Workspace: Many a times when you need to understand or optimize the dependency tree in Eclipse projects, it's simpler to look at .classpath file or at the build path of Eclipse project. However it doesn't remain practical for a big workspace as .classpath file contains many other things other than <classpathentry/> tags and also you have [...]