Posts

I spoke with Ben Linders of InfoQ (thrilled to be published at that website!) about challenges and communication patterns for Distributed Teams, uncovering bits of my Atlassian Summit 2018 speech. The biggest challenge of distributed teams is communication, which is essential for establishing ground rules on collaboration. Shifting working hours to accommodate each other and team liaisons help to communicate and synchronize work. Teams based on trust, respect, and openness will thenselves to help people throughout the organization and foster a culture that keeps teams in sync. ...

Stride is being discontinued as of Feb 2019, and Atlassian itself moves to Slack. It was quite hard to use Stride as the speed of the electron package was painful, integrations were worse than in Slack (even with Atlassian products), stability and features were suffering quite heavily. It’s great that a team can admit it’s pain points, since it’s almost impossible to compete with de-facto industry standard ‘Slack’. I’ve written about experience of 6 months on Stride, we’ll jump off it, I presume, closer to the end of product support.

Hey guys, good news - Minsk has it’s own Atlassian User Group now, me & StiltSoft kicked out the first event, gathered 60 RSVP’s in just one week, and had an amazing time in the beautiful city of Minsk, Belarus! Hosted an event in an awesome Eventspace.by at the old factory! [gallery ids=“902,899,900” type=“rectangular”] - <a title="AUG Minsk, SkuVault->Jira" href="/images/aug-minsk-skuvault-jira.pdf">AUG Minsk, SkuVault-Jira</a> - Speech on how we organized processes and workflows in Jira, and helped SkuVault become more transparent in development; - [AUG Minsk, Stride](/images/aug-minsk-stride.pdf) - our experience in migration from Telegram to Atlassian Stride. https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6396021858935861248 ...

Recently I hosted Minsk Atlassian User Group, where I shared our experience on migrating to Stride and gave the analogy between Stride, and Russian word ‘Stradai’ (-> eng.: ‘Suffer’). I’ll explain the analogy later. Hence the ‘Napalm Death’ song ‘Suffer’ joke on the first slide :) Given that a lot of people use Telegram as a corporate messenger, and given all of the telegram-blocking happening in Russia currently, it’s pretty relevant to write about alternatives. We at SkuVault migrated due to the need of user control, but migration experience is relevant to many other teams. ...

So we’ve survived Ufa Atlassian User Group, the very first meetup, with 17 people visiting our office to hear about jira, confluence, bitbucket and other atlassian products :) [gallery ids=“869,870,871,872,873” type=“square”] We’ve discussed how Jira helped us in reflecting SkuVault development processes, and how do we keep documentation on the feature in Confluence, until it’s released, and what info do we store there. Panel consisted of Smena.io, modulbank, MEGI, and a couple other teams :) Presentation is available in Russian via this link: UfaAUG_1. ...

So as you know my speciality is distributed teams :) This post is about what changes does the agile communication face (and scrum in particular), when it’s adjusted to the distributed teams. This is my experience, I don’t assume this is a silver bullet, but such approach works for me for the last 5 years and proved itself to be proficient. Let’s divide communication by types: - stragetic meetings (plannning, retrospective) - daily huddles (e.g. daily standup in scrum) - day-to-day clarifications. by Text I mean Instant Messaging ...

UPD: Rescheduled Jan. 30th -> to Feb. 6th. Recently buddies from Moscow recommended me to join Atlassian User Group Leaders,to host Atlassian events in Ufa, so here I am (after an interview with Atassian)! First ever-ever Atlassian User Group with special Atlassian swag will be happening January 30 2018, 7pm :) Meetup related to all things atlassian and related! Follow the link and save the date :) https://aug.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-ufa-presents-ufa-atlassian-user-group-1#/ - # I'll be talking about how we adapted our development workflow in JIRA - # Documentation lifecycle in confluence at SkuVault More topics to come, from our local Atlassian Users :)

This time it was all about requirements. And we hosted the event at our cozy SkuVault office: - Eliciting and preparing requirements from gathering data till development: Oleg Gumerov (PO at SMENA - solutions provider for a big delivery service) shared his experience on how they do it in SMENA.io; - Nur Ibragimov (Head Analyst at modulbank) shared their way of processing requirements; - Us (me and Ksenia - also PM/ BA at SkuVault) shared how we do it in SkuVault, as well as how we used to work on requirements at Storia.me back in the days. - Formalizing and Structuring the requirements, by our own Ksenia of SkuVault - Tracking changes in Requirements by Ksenia (lightning talk) - Tracking time and Estimations by me (lightning talk) - Documentation Lifecycle when developing a feature (by me) And that was my first-time experience of stitching video and audio :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPxLpW1f8IA ...

2 weeks after we had the actual meetup, here’s the follow-up post :) Topics this time: - Keynote by me on [cynefin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8) and how it fits our company projects. Had some discussion & arguing on applicacy of cynefin when it comes to rough development times, migrations, firefighting-based development. Overall, model was introduced, and the fact-and-experience-based arguments are always the best. Cause we all keep it harsh, true and ironic, when it comes to sharing something you've been stuffing bumps on! - Afterwards beer-session was a 3-hour-rant on headhunting of employees by Moscow, Saint-Petersburgh, Europe and States, and that Ufa developers became much more audacious, over the past crisis-driven years (given that there was no crisis in Moscow and the rest of the world). Seems like the raises are imminent, if you want to keep the developer. Headhunting becomes more brutal and sneaky at the same time! - Yet another topic was keeping the valuable professional, when he reaches the limites of intra-company growth, and what is best to offer in those cases. ...

Me & my colleague basically decided to attend Agile Greece and Agile Turkey, and then exchange opinions and knowledge gathered there. Big advantage of my trip was Dave Snowden’s keynote, whom I wanted to catch after the speech and bore to death with silly questions :) Agile Turkey Itself The conference (1-day conference, october 19th) kind of frustrated me, as 2/3rds of speeches were in Turkish, so I had to ditch my plan to attend certain events, and half of the time was roaming around the conference floor. ...