Agile Leaders Interviews: Akalpit Gadre of Mutual of Enumclaw

Akalpit Gadre (on Github) is a Senior Scrum Master with strong technical aptitude who enjoys getting technologists excited about business problems. Strives for transparency and continuous learning.

7 years experience in software development with a specialty in: 

- Agile Scrum and Kanban Methodologies

- Servant Leadership

- Web Applications

- AWS Cloud native solutions

What have been the most unexpected changes you've encountered in your software development process and/or team post-COVID?

We went from all on-site to all remote development which was huge, as communication became a big challenge at first then we worked to do more 1-1 and other video meetings.

What have you learned from a full year of all (or mostly) remote development?

Remote tools have very interesting (sometimes frustrating) capabilities. Recording our discussions and using them for reference later has been helping us a lot.

What's one lesson that you want to apply (or thing that you want to do differently) in the coming year?

Have more discussions about stories and record those discussions

Any other lessons you must also apply?

keep communicating and having short but frequent 1-1s

There's a lot of talk about creating a blameless engineering culture. Do you agree with this as a goal? How is this currently supported in your organization?

I love the goal of a blameless engineering culture. It's still not quite supported in my org but we are working towards it. It helps to set a context of "Process inspection and Improvement" Vs "Individual performance inspection and improvement"

Retrospectives tend to be fairly qualitative. Would quantitative data contribute to sprint retros? If so, what would you want access to – and how could it assist?

Quantitative data from sprint retrospectives that could help is Average Lead Time/Cycle Time (depends on how one defines those terms but the time it takes from confirming a problem/opportunity needs to be solved to when the problem/opportunity is actually solved)

Number of Prod defects attributed to a release 

Mean time to resolution, if/while the team handles production support