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"Before you write any code, make sure you have a failing test." This was a revolutionary idea, when it was first pitched in the late 90's. Many successful entrepreneurs have been practicing a similar approach– "Before you build a product/service, make sure you have paying customers." In this article, Naresh Jain shares his approach of finding effective MVPs to validate his educational product and why Agile methods simply fail.
InfoQ spoke to Naresh Jain, chair of Agile India 2013 about emerging Agile trends in India. Naresh talks about Product Discovery, Lean Startup, Continuous Delivery and much more, from an Indian context.
Naresh was proposed by Rashina. She says that Naresh was an important driving force behind the rise of the Agile community in India. I seem to run across Naresh on multiple places on the internet. I have no idea where I met him first. He seems to be all over the place. He is one of these people engaged in more community events than I am.
To run a marathon, a team must be disciplined, practice everyday, and keep a sustainable pace. When working on software projects, we don't want to run just once and exhaust ourselves. We need to keep going at a steady pace. Sustainable teams are geared towards running marathons and not allowed to just run sprints.
This article is part of the Agile Manifesto 10th Anniversary series that is being published on InfoQ.
It is human nature to look for patterns in solving problems and we have a tendency to want to reuse what we already know. Sometimes this is a useful tactic, but often the problem we face is not the same as the previous problems. Hence our previous way of doing things is not best suited for tackling the next problem. In the world of software development we often see the same desire to find the "one true way" and "the BEST method" to solve problems.
How does Naresh Jain go from teaching C++ to running two startups? Along the way Naresh was awarded the Gordon Pask Award from the Agile Alliance as a recognition for his contributions to the Agile practice.
What do successful teams do that others don't? They constantly question their own practices and try to eliminate wasteful ones. They mercilessly refactor their processes along with their software.
A core tenet of agile development is the value of "simplicity" - particularly when it comes to software design and even the manner in which it's tested. Since 2006, Gordon Pask Award recipient Naresh Jain has been running a worldwide "Open Space" formatted conference, the Simple Design & Testing Conference, for the practitioners to meet and push the boundaries on what this really looks like and what it means.
It is a well-known fact that if you measure the wrong things, you encourage wrong behavior. Software teams suffer daily because their managers are tracking and measuring them against the wrong parameters.
Naresh Jain is the founder of Agile Software Community of India, as well as the chair at the upcoming Agile India conference. We got in touch with Naresh to know more about adoption of Agile methodologies in Indian companies and how the path looks going forward.
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