At N-iX has Agile Center of Excellence, we make continuous efforts towards improving agile readiness of our organization. Our certified scrum masters and agile coaches’, work together to define better practices and processes that can be used by our teams to deliver more value to our clients. We stay closely in touch with agile news and developments around the globe, with emphasis on geographic areas, where our clients are located.
Our agile leaders always ensure that all our engagements with clients that require agile development contain necessary ‘ingredients’ for effective cooperation from our side as well as from our clients (e.g. effective product ownership).
Frequent delivery of fully tested codebase by using Agile Methodology is a KEY
N-iX assists its clients get their products to the market much faster, and by doing so, beat their clients, by using Agile Methodology for .NET, Java, C/C++ Software Development. N-iX adopted best practices and processes of project management processes to streamline results, increase transparency and traceability. Those N-iX projects that are executed in agile mode, deliver fully coded, tested and fully operational software, incrementally. Agile methodology is being used with N-iX existing and new customers when their requirements are subject to frequent changes.
How We Operate:
When our clients prefer to execute a project by using agile methodology, N-iX assembles a cross functional team of architects, designers, developers, testers and ScrumMaster that is tailored to a customers’ needs.
We rely on guidance and expertise of our internal agile experts as well as consulting Agile Coaches to improve maturity of our scrum teams as well as align our agile practices with existing agile practices of our clients.
Depending on a project’s size we may suggest to engage two or three teams that would work in parallel on different parts of the product.
We use Product backlog as an ultimate repository of all requirements. Our Product Owners (client representatives) are responsible for maintaining the backlog, continuously grooming it and assigning priorities to all user stories. Our agile BAs (collocated with scrum teams) effectively assist POs to relay requirements and provide clarifications to scrum team members. This significantly enhances our collaboration with the business. Our PO-BA ‘unions’ have proved themselves to be very effective in breaking down product backlogs in to release backlogs and then, further into sprint backlogs. We are constantly in touch with our remote clients by effectively using collaboration technologies (webinars, video conferencing, agile collaboration software) and this very greatly compensates for some time zone and geographic separation that we have with some of our clients.
Before each sprint, our scrum teams, led by SMs, go through a story pointing exercise (typically, by using virtual planning poker game so that POs can observe it), carefully estimating stories, breaking them down further (if needed) and committing. For each project, depending on sprint length our teams establish a steady velocity (typically, it takes us 2-4 sprints), which makes our future planning sessions more reliable.
Every sprint, the length of which depends on particulars of each individual client, our scrum team members work through a sprint backlog by developing and testing individual stories, by effectively breaking them down into individual technical sub-tasks. As our teams burn through each sprint, they effectively go through all phases of SDLC and deliver a functional codebase at the end.
Any defects found in a sprint, our teams strive to fix within the same sprint. In those instances when a team was not able to deliver everything it committed during planning or there were some bugs discovered in a sprint that a team was not able to fix, we effectively engage POs to provide further guidance on what needs to be built/fixed immediately in the next iteration and what can go back to a backlog and wait for future planning.
Depending on our clients’ geographic location, our scrum teams run daily stand ups either early in the morning or later in the day, to accommodate clients’ POs. In those instances, when we are separated from our clients by time zones, we may run internal morning stand ups, where only team members update each other and BAs act as PO-proxies, and then later stand-ups, later in the day, with PO’s presence. We always emphasize the importance of having client POs and our local BAs be ‘joined at the hip’ – a very effective way of ensuring that business requirements get clarified to our developers and testers without interruption.
A the end of each sprint our teams give sprint reviews/demos to POs and other client business representatives, at which point they decide if our deliverables are excepted. We effectively use webinars and video conferencing to make review sessions very collaborative and engaging.
Immediately after each review session, our teams conduct a retrospective meeting (just the team members, SM and PO), where they discuss lesson learned from each sprint and identify areas where improvement needed.
Immediate Benefits to Our Clients:
Frequent deliveries of fully functional software
Increased transparency of our work and the fact that clients (product owners) can always and engage in a dialogue with scrum teams and inspect their work
Ability of scrum teams to embrace, rather than resist frequently changing requirements on agile projects
Efficient budget and resource management that rests on resource driven development
Increased capability to effective risk management and timely reporting to management and clients
Delivering Agile Expertise to our Clients:
Finally, if our clients call upon us to help them with agile transformation, we engage our agile coaches. They ensure that our clients get educated on agile methodology, are comfortable with levels and forms of engagement that is required of them to make scrum work. Our coaches also assist clients to build strong product ownership. Making our clients agile-savvy is a key to their successful collaboration with our scrum teams.
If you have any questions about agile readiness of N-iX or our ability to assist clients with agile transformation, please contact us at
To learn more about how we deliver agile expertise and training directly to our clients, you can download our presentation on agile transformation here.
