Leapset shares expertise on transitioning to Agile at SLASSCOM forum
Thursday, 8 August 2013 00:00
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Leapset shared international industry best practices on agile programming at the ‘Transitioning to Agile’ forum held by SLASSCOM recently. The session’s key speaker, Sisira Kumara, Head of Quality Assurance at Leapset Ltd., presented a comprehensive guide on moving from a traditional to Agile programming model based on Leapset’s state of the art practices.
Sharing his knowledge with the audience, Sisira Kumara said: “Unlike traditional methodologies, agile is highly flexible and demands this same virtue from the teams that adopt it. Instead of following a rigid plan, that might be irrelevant or outdated by the time a project is completed, agile drives people to respond to change on the fly. This approach to project management is an art in balancing freedom and agility, with guidance. Understanding where you are now and where you want to get, is a prerogative of the successful, as is the ability to work on multiple projects simultaneously and non-sequentially.”
The session went into great detail about the various methods of the agile approach, starting from extreme programming and scrum, to the new ‘Kanban’ method, which is a visual process management system from Japan that tracks what to produce, when to produce it, and how much of it should be produced.
Commenting on the experience sharing session, Rasika Karunatilake, General Manager, Leapset said: “Many organisations are now attempting to adopt agile, as successful agile software development teams are producing higher-quality software that better meets the needs of users, faster and at a lower cost than traditional teams. The process of adopting a whole new methodology, be it scrum or Kanban, can be challenging, but at Leapset we have seen that the competitive advantages agile provides are indispensable.”
In conclusion, Sisira Kumara explained that the starting point of transitioning to agile should be a thorough assessment of the current situation as well as setting a clear direction and a high-level strategy. In agile there is more space for innovation and flexibility, and design and development comes as a single step in place of the traditional two step approach.
Sisira Kumara has over 15 years of industry experience in diverse areas of the IT sector where he has proved his capabilities in the areas of IT training, network design and implementation, software testing, project management and consultancy. He is currently working as the Head of Quality Assurance at Leapset. Prior to Leapset, Sisira has worked at Virtusa and Aepona. Sisira has experience in handling large software testing projects in various international client engagements and managed over 350 SQA professionals in his prior role as the QA Manager for a business unit.
