Lopamudra Misra

Lopamudra Misra started her Scrum Journey from March 2011. Prior to that, my experience as a software developer and designer was mainly in traditional  water fall methodology where the requirements were defined upfront with a fixed budget and timelines. During this phase have exprienced issues with schedule slippage and cost overrun. Apart from that as a technical person have faced issues with the end product not being aligned with the business resulting with higher defect density and unsatisfied customer.

From 2007-2011, as a technical designer, started working in interative development model. This helped in  removing few challenges like delivering features in small steps and improvising it step by step. This helps in tracking defects earlier on in the cycle and reducing cost. However, it didnt solve all the problem and still it was series of waterfall cycle.

From April 2011, started my Scrum journey where I was part of a development team in delivering small enhancements for various customer facing applications as Scrum Master. We used to follow a 4 week Sprint with clear /unclear backlog. However, we found the biggest advantage of getting continuous feedback from business. Apart from that. we also started using certain other practices like System Thinkings, XP practices and after 6 months, the end result was customer satisfaction. This was possible due to constant support from management and valuable coaching from the seniors within organisation who practiced Agile software development.  We followed as a team the principle of "Inspect & Adapt" which helped the team to improve.

As a scrum master introduced planning poker for estimating user stories. Emphasized on early feedback from all stakeholders (PO, Product manager etc.) via quick prototyping and proof of concepts as the dependent software platform was still under development, team and domain was relatively new.

Attending scrum master training further refined my knowledge in the area of agile & scrum which became handy during effective sprint reviews and retrospectives.

Some of the key contribution after being part of scrum team & scrum master are