Posted by Pieter Rijken mid-afternoon: September 23rd, 2011
In Agile methods focus on short feedback cycles and regular delivery of (business) value. Both are supported by having short lead times. Kanban is one of the tools to manage the flow of tasks and reduce lead times.
This article shows how to reduce lead times even further.
One of the mechanisms in Kanban to manage flow is to explicitly set a limit on the amount of work in progress for a process step. By modifying this to include part of the next process step, this article shows that the amount of work in progress is limited more and therefore also lead times are reduced.
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Posted by Martien van Steenbergen mid-morning: August 29th, 2011
What electronics tools exist to electronically master the agile process like Scrum, Kanban, and others?
Since this question surfaces every now and then, answers collect here (in alphabetical order).
- Agile Bench
- Google Docs
- Microsoft » Excel
- FlowKaizen
- Atlassian » Greenhopper for JIRA
- Hansoft
- Bandit Software » LeanKit Kanban
- Pivot Labs » Pivotal Tracker
- Rally Software » Rally
- ScrumDesk
- Silver Stripe » Silver Catalyst
- smartQ
- TargetProcess
- Version One Suite
- Atlassian » Vodafone wins Ultimate Scrum Board Award
Got more?
Contributors:
- Serge Beaumont
- Erica
- Theo Gerrits
- Olav Maassen
- Pieter Rijken
- Yves Hanoulle
- Jem
Posted by Niklas Odding in the early morning: May 3rd, 2011
This Blog is a kick off to for many writings about architecture in an Agile World. We will explore the topic from all the views possible, in order to gain a better understanding about it. By doing so, we hope to create a community of followers, who would also like to contribute or discuss about this topic.
Xebia is helping many organizations in the Netherlands, France, the United States and India with implementing an agile way of system development. In most of the cases the Scrum method is applied and very good results are achieved. Business and IT are working much closer together, resulting in more quality and much more customer satisfaction. However, lately we also see a trend in problems that seem to occur in (almost) every organization. Software is developed in a fast way with high quality, but it takes forever to get it in production. The more teams are being formed, the more interdependencies between the teams occur (more…)
Posted by Marnix van Wendel de Joode in the early afternoon: September 2nd, 2010
In Agile, everyone agrees on the concept that continuous improvement is a good thing. In Scrum and also in most Kanban practices we even have a ceremony to support this, namely The Retrospective. This periodically occurring meeting (often every other week) with the entire team plays a vital part in the process and in team dynamics.
In most retrospectives, focus is on improvement. Questions are asked like ‘What is going wrong or could be done better?’, ‘What can we do to improve things?’, ‘Did we actually improve?’. While there is real value in these questions (and they should definitely should be asked), there is another part of a retrospective that is also very important: The Good Things.
Posted by Wilco Koorn mid-morning: August 23rd, 2010
Last week I enjoyed to opportunity to speak at the Agile2010 conference in Orlando, Florida. Of course, I also attended many of the other sessions as well. The conference has in my view an excellent atmosphere. Where I expected to find lots of consultants in their typical formal style of dressing I found 1400 people mostly dressed in T-shirt, jeans and sneakers instead. This must be the result of the Agile movement itself where people are first class citizens right?
The portfolio of Agile2010 contains ‘hardcore technical’ sessions like tutorials in Clojure coding, real ‘softcore’ sessions like “Behavior Driven Development for Life” which advocated using Neural Linguistic Programming techniques straight from psychology and also sessions around themes like Leadership and Coaching. Don’t worry, the conference organizing committee splits these nicely up in ‘Themes’ and ‘Stages’ so even if you only look at the program by a glance, you’ll hardly ever end up in an unwanted session.
This is what I picked up from the conference in summary (you’ll find all the details below):
- Conference focus (or lack thereof)
- “Religious wars” between Scrum, Kanban, Xp, Lean, …
- Agile adoption in organizations worldwide
- “Value points” (compare to “Complexity points”)
- “Switch”
- Company improvement backlog
Next I’ll elaborate a bit about my own experience as a speaker. The combination of what I picked up and my speaker experience will give you a good basis to decide if you want to put next year’s edition (Salt Lake City August 7-13, 2011) in your agenda or not be it as an attendee or as a speaker. Enjoy!
Posted by Sander Hautvast mid-morning: August 20th, 2010
This is number 8, the third article in a top10 of middleware management pitfalls. The previous article dealt with infrastructure. This time I´ll discuss the application itself.
There has been much cool stuff lately about devops and devs and ops working together in one team, like at sky.com. The uncool reality for a lot of companies is that dev and ops are separated in different departments and don´t communicate well. Immature applications, at least from a middleware perspective, are what you get.