Naresh Jain is the founder Vice-Chairman of the Agile Software Community of India (ASCI) and the organizer of the Simple Design And Testing Conference (SDTConf). Naresh has help start various Agile User Groups including the Agile Philly User Group and various groups in India. Naresh is an active Open Source committer and enjoys teaching software development courses in Universities. By being a part of the team, Naresh helps software companies embrace agile. Naresh is passionate about building a community of talented and capable software craftsman, the next generation software leaders in India. In recognition of his accomplishments, in 2007 the Agile Alliance awarded Naresh with the Gordon Pask Award for contributions to the Agile Community by establishing Agile User Groups in India and for creating the Simple Design and Testing conference. He has worked on variety of software projects utilizing XP, Scrum and Crystal techniques since 2003. Currently, Naresh Jain is software craftsman working for Directi as Quality and Community Evangelist. In this interview, Naresh talks about his experiences in spreading awareness about Agile and helping companies adopt Agile in India.

agilecollab : Please tell us how were you exposed to Agile?

Naresh Jain : Back in the dark days of my life, I was working as a coder (not programmer) on a big J2EE project. This was for a IT division of a big Bank. We had a really smart Architect sitting in UK who would provide development guidelines. One of his guidelines was, as soon as we finish a feature, we were supposed to write JUnit tests before we check in the code. As soon as any team member would check-in code, he would check out the code on his machine and do a code review (he literally acted as our Continuous integration build server). For those of us who had never written a unit test, this was a boon in disguise to avoid stupid mistakes. As I got used to this approach of writing unit tests after the code was written, I felt I was wasting too much time building the wrong code. My test would give me the feedback that I made a silly assumption. This feedback was great, but I had already spent the time writing the wrong code. My manager always told us, work smarter not harder. So in the search of smarter ways to do the same, I stumbled upon the life changing article “Test Infected“. The whole Test-First approached seemed so much superior than what we were doing. And thus began my journey into the Agile world!

agilecollab : What has been the motivation behind ASCI?

Naresh Jain : Scratch your personal itch! While I saw a clear value in Agile and light-weight methods, there were very few companies in India who actually knew about these methods. Agile was making big news in the west and community based conferences was a growing trend there. In late 2004, Owen Rogers and Manoj Bharadwaj were planning to organize a one day conference in Bangalore similar to the XP Day. Manoj spotted my interest in community building and asked me to help them. I was very interested and happily joined forces with Owen and Manoj. Soon the conference planning started picking up steam. At one point, (a month before the conference) we had to figure out a way to manage funds. So we wanted to open a bank account. We realized that it would be difficult to open a bank account without having some kind of an organization. Since this was a non-profit event, KK Rajan suggested we register a non-profit society and open a bank account in its name. Bhavin Javia suggested the name ASCI - Agile Software Community of India. And today we have ASCI. So what started off as a means to handle funds for a non-profit conference, today is grown into a large body of Agile enthusiasts and practitioners. Today ASCI provides a platform for people from different software organizations to come together and share their experience with Software development methodologies. ASCI’s focus is Agile and related light weight methodologies/philosophies. ASCI evangelizes itself to be a facilitating body which fosters and innovates lightweight methodologies in software development in India.

agilecollab : How can one become a member of ASCI?

Naresh Jain : We believe in keeping it simple and lean. Details : http://agileindia.org/membership.htm

agilecollab : What are the plans for coming year and ahead for ASCI?

Naresh Jain : While Agile is got into mainstream, there are a huge number of organizations in India who want to adopt Agile. So the focus of ASCI has shifted from Agile awareness to Agile adoption. ASCI’s model to achieve this has mainly been through conference and user groups. We have consciously not got into training and certification. And hope we’ll never get into it. ASCI has just formed a new board and I think this board will take ASCI to the next level.

agilecollab : How have last few years been in adoption of Agile principles and practices in India?

Naresh Jain : There has been an exponential growth. In 2004, there were hardly any companies that were aware of Agile. Today most of the big companies have piloted at least a few projects using Agile and some companies are using Agile principles and practices in majority of their projects. Smaller companies have found it easy to adopt agile while the big CMM companies are getting there.

agilecollab : Do you think the motivation for adopting Agile is more in product companies than IT Services companies?

Naresh Jain : I don’t really have data to say whether its more in product companies or in services companies. There are a large number of companies in both categories that are adopting Agile. In the product space, time to market and improving efficiency/ productivity is driving the adoption. In other words, the motivation is mostly internal. While in the services space, competitive advantage and customer/counterpart pressure is really driving the adoption. In other words, the motivation is mostly external.

agilecollab : Is there a regional bias in India with regards to Agile adoption, with South leading way over North?

Naresh Jain : Based on my interaction with various companies all over India, Bangalore has the highest number of companies practicing Agile. Also in terms of their experience, Bangalore seems to have lot more companies with pretty good understanding of Agile. Having said that, companies in Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, NCR, Chandigarh, etc are catching up big time. But, I think Bangalore does have the first starter advantage.

agilecollab : According to you, which of Agile frameworks fits better in Indian context?

Naresh Jain : In my personal experience eXtreme Programing, Crystal and Lean are the frameworks from which companies in India will really benefit. Scrum would also be important form a marketing perspective. For Ex: A services company can bid for a project saying “We have 5 certified scrum masters”!

agilecollab : What according to you are major factors which impede organizations journey towards agility?

Naresh Jain : Organization Culture and People’s attitude towards change.

agilecollab : We have started Agile Chandigarh [users can join on LinkedIn and Yahoo Groups]. It is at a nascent stage. However, it would be probably only second such group in North. What advice would you give to the group?

Naresh Jain : I’m nobody to give advice. But now that you have asked. I have 3 advices:
1. Perseverance
2. Perseverance
3. Perseverance
It takes a bloody long time for people to invest time in user groups and to value free peer-to-peer community based learning. Most people want an easy way out. Pay, sit through a class for 2 days and walk out with a certificate. Now that we have taken the first step in the right direction, I think 50% of our job is done. Also remember ASCI will live as long as such initiatives are taken by people in different parts of the country.

agilecollab : Finally, any plans to visit Chandigarh?

Naresh Jain : Not that I know of. But if you plan to organize a Agile Chandigarh 08 Conference, you can count on me to move the boxes.

Popularity: 32%

Posted on March 24th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Around the Globe, Interviews, Leadership | 2 Comments »

In our post on Product Owner, we discussed, how some of the most effective product owners have deep knowledge of the market, connect with the customers and can structure as well as prioritize requirements for the development team. In addition, they have great facilitation skills to set up environment where collaboration is fostered and utilized for competitive advantage resulting in sustainable delivery of high quality software.

We have been working with one such product owner. Sean Devlin plays the role of product owner for Front Rush - he explains requirements with business and acceptance test perspective and ruthlessly simplifies and prioritizes them. And its partly because of him that despite no face to face communication, what so ever - the product has been built to great quality and tremendous success, and continues to be built with great quality and tremendous success. In this interview, Sean Devlin shares his experiences in being a product owner.

agilecollab :  What was the business case around Front Rush and how did initial idea come about?

Sean Devlin : Collegiate Athletics in the U.S. is big business.  College coaches are under huge amounts of pressure to perform successfully because of the correlation between athletic success and alumni giving rates, total applicants, and national recognition which in turn supports the universities’ academic initiatives.  The first step in building a successful program is recruiting high school athletes to play for the respective university and with this comes a huge burden of storing large amounts of data for each recruit.  Coaches need to track, not just the contact information but also the number of times they communicated, visited, and evaluated each athlete.  A single coach can track anywhere from 50 to 12,000 recruits in a single year and prior to Front Rush, this was mostly done through hard copies and archaic databases not built specifically for recruiting and certainly not suitable.  In addition to storing data, coaches also need to be able to communicate with their athletes the same way athletes communicate with each other.  The old model of sending a letter and a follow up call has become obsolete in a society built on real-time communication.  The coaches recruiting model is nearly identical to the sales model used in big business today except replacing ’sales leads’ with ‘recruits’.  Front Rush simply applied the CRM technology pervasive in the business space and tailored it to collegiate athletics.  The focus is on usability so that coaches of all ages and technological backgrounds or lack there of can benefit from the application. The co-founder of Front Rush, Brad Downs, played collegiate baseball, and while being closely affiliated with the coaching staff saw first hand the inadequacies of the current hard copy/excel driven model of recruiting.  He had contacted me because of my background in the technology sector and together we developed ideas for Front Rush based on current CRM Systems, new technologies and scalable processes that would simplify a coach’s day to day.

agilecollab : Why did you select Net Solutions as your development partner?

Sean Devlin : During the dot-com boom, I had two high school colleagues who were using an outsourcing partner in India to develop web-sites for state-side clients.  For a brief period of time, I had done research on potential outsourcing partners which is where I first came across Net Solutions.  I later started a company, esman productions, which focused on organic marketing campaigns through college students and used Net Solutions’ services to develop our flash website.  Spin the big hand on a clock a few years and we needed a partner for development with Front Rush.  I contacted Net Solutions first because of the history with esman productions.  I also contacted other firms world wide.  We made the decision to work with Net Solutions because of their immediate understanding of our needs and the quality of product we could expect.

agilecollab : As a Product Owner what were the challenges in constructing requirements and getting market feedback?

Sean Devlin :  Getting market feedback is easy for us.  We have a perpetual dialog with our end-users about the speed, performance, usability and functionality of Front Rush.  Coaches know how they want Front Rush to work for them, and we work very hard to make this happen without diluting the core focus of the product.

agilecollab : In this light, how your overall experience been in working with Net Solutions?

Sean Devlin : At Front Rush, we expect only the best.  That is why we work with Net Solutions.

agilecollab : What were your original concerns in going with Net Solutions? How do you think we fared in this regard?

Sean Devlin : Our initial concern was whether or not the needs of a non-tech savvy coach would translate and scale in our CRM-type application.  This concern only lasted until we built the first mock-up of Front Rush and realized immediately that anybody would be able to use Front Rush regardless of their tech knowledge.

agilecollab : You have worked on both a fixed price and an hourly queue model. We know both were Agile in nature. Which one you liked more and why?

Sean Devlin : A fixed price model was sufficient for getting Front Rush off the ground and into a working application.  However, because of the growing needs of coaches, we have had to evolve our development model in order to be completely Agile.  Having a dedicated team makes it much easier to abide by SCRUM rules which results in more productive, effective development.  SCRUM allows us to develop in the moment and take projects in different directions as we see necessary.

agilecollab : What were some of the things you would recommend for a great development team - remote product owner participation?

Sean Devlin : I would recommend getting the best talent that you can find and set up an environment that will allow you and your team to be as light and quick as possible.  Make certain that there are no communication barriers and always err toward simplicity.

agilecollab : What sort of tools you use at your end to manage requirements, weight their priority or do you keep it simple?

Sean Devlin : From a development perspective, we do in fact have the giant white board with every recommendation, and every idea, every bug, and every concern that our end-users express to us.  The reality is that we rarely reference it.  We work very hard to engage our customers in open dialog so that we can understand their needs in and out — the white board is really just a formality. From a communication perspective, we are moving exclusively to 37 Signals’ Campfire. Its a great medium to collaborate with your team, share projects, files and then reference later on.

agilecollab : Finally, what are future plans for Front Rush?

Sean Devlin : Front Rush just released an application for Coaches to manage their camps which is a simple spin off of the current Front Rush application except with an e-commerce component for campers to pay online.  This is a major step in building an environment, through our applications, that will give coaches all of the tools necessary to spend as little time in the office and more time out on the field winning games!

Popularity: 23%

Posted on March 13th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Case Studies, Interviews, Outsourcing 2.0 | No Comments »