Posts

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. ...

Small and duct-tapey resolution for the time, when you have an All -> [statusName] JIRA workflow transition. By default, it results in the following: Default Ticket Screen shows transition from current to current status, among others. So e.g., you have an In Progress ticket, you have the transition to the very same In Progress. To avoid that, use simple conditioning for the transition: - Go to transition Conditions - Click Add New - Select 'Value Field' from the given list - Select logical operator 'doesn't equal' / '!=' - And put a value in it (name of current status, and the value to be handled as string) Start Working is the transition name to the “In Progress” status This is how it looks in Workflow ...

This post is available in English. И делаем это без необходимости прилета в РФ американского гендира. Последние полгода я набивал шишки, ходя по инстанциям, собственно, поделюсь опытом :) Задача: открыть 100-процентную дочку в России (материнская SkuVault.com находится в Луисвилле, Кентукки). Наш случай несколько уникален: CEO не мог посетить РФ, так что заверять и пересылать идентификационные документы приходилось туда-сюда меж двух контитентов. На практике, все делается достаточно просто. Всего-то придется столкнуться с бюрократической машиной Mother Russia (которая за последние годы стала неимоверно удобнее), проблемами с межведомственной коммуникацией, ну да беготней с документами. ...

This is basically the anatomy of a distributed team, working on requirements. Key point here is that this is the process working for us, in current configuration, and it’s effective. Disclaimer: Every organization is different: from internal structure to how it communicates with the outer world. So no workflow is a silver bullet. *Disclaimer 2: SkuVault is an ever-improving team of ~50 people, distributed across 10 timezones, 2 different versions, and serving loyal clients worldwide 24/7. Learn more about Communication in distributed teams: Messenger & Rules, or *Why we ditched Scrum, in favor of Kanban in JIRA ...