Kanban Digest | TargetProcess Product Blog. The year 2009 is ending, so it’s time to look back and remember the ideas that have been guiding us. One of the main features (if not the most important one) that appeared in TargetProcess in 2009 is Kanban support. Take a look at this collection of posts in TargetProcess agile blog related to Kanban. This is an overview of our Kanban-based development processThat’s how we use Kanban boardThese posts have been the hits in August – 5 Reasons for using or not using KanbanWhy Kanban works better for mature products vs. new appsMore posts on Kanban See how Kanban is supported in TargetProcess agile project management software: Kanban Board, Cumulative Flow Diagram, Lead and Cycle Time reports. Kanban vs Scrum - Henrik Kniberg's blog. Comic - Agile Development Explained. Scrum 4 You - Boris Gloger. Scrum from the Trenches. Rules of Productivity Presentation. How do we get more work done? It is a question that every manager and every passionate worker faces.
Yet, for the most part, teams operate on gut instinct and habit. The results are less than optimal. Over the years I've been collecting small pieces of research on various factors that actually seem to improve productivity. Topics covered include: The idiocy of prolonged overtimeThe unintuitive connection between doing more and making better products. Production Support and Scrum (Scrum Alliance Blog) Teams adopting Scrum not only have to deal with the normal project complexities of prioritisation, estimation, and turning product backlog items into potentially deployable increments of functionality, they also often have to support a system in production or address bugs that come back to them during development.
How do we track and prioritize these support activities? How do we handle emergencies? Who performs production support? Bug of the Day Production support can be seen as a disruption to teams that just want to get on with things but is often very dear to the heart of the system users and, therefore, the Product Owner. However, this approach to production support can’t be planned—just dealing with it as it comes up can lead us away from the most appropriate decisions as we get caught up with the “bug of the day” scenario. If we follow this route, there is a perceived risk that our bugs will never get fixed. First Steps Bugs as Feature Requests Emergencies Who Does It? Target Process - Agile, XP, SCRUM, etc.
Writing User Stores - Agile Requirements. Dent - SCRUM to Solo (How small is too small?) Our Development Process. Defining Kanban. There has been a long thread in the kanbandev group at Yahoo about how to define what a kanban system is, and is not. Defining kanban is important because without an unambiguous definition it is difficult to discuss kanban. A kanban system is a system for process control. Kanban was invented by Taichi Ohno at Toyota more than fifty years ago. There are many types of kanban systems, for production processes, for administrative processes, for software development...
All kanban systems have certain characteristics in common. We in the software community are new to kanban, and it is easy to get a bit too enthusiastic, and unintentionally change the meaning of kanban when we discuss it. The following Intermediate Objective Map reflects my current understanding of kanban (feel free to laugh if you are from Toyota, Honda, or one of the many other companies that has spent decades building a thorough knowledge of kanban): Here is a somewhat simplified map of a kanban system: Three reasons why story points are better than ideal man days for ...
I often hear from Scrum teams they don’t understand why estimating in story points are better than estimating in ideal man days. Here comes three reasons: Reason 1. Estimation is a way of telling the size of a story, not how long it takes to implement it. If you give the size in a unit that sounds like a time people will likely mix things up. If you have persons in your organization who are control freaks it’s hard to explain why a story with size 5 ideal man days takes two weeks to develop.
Reason 2. Reason 3. My recommendation is to estimate in story points and use velocity to calculate the time just like you do for driving. This is how you can get started. Before our first planning meeting we need to know our velocity so we know how much we can commit to. To get an initial velocity for our first sprint, we estimate the selected standard story in ideal man days. Good luck! Agile Software Development: What's The Point In Estimating? One technique used by agile development teams is the idea of estimating product features using points.
This has a few distinct advantages over estimating in physical units of time. 1. Estimating is very quick because it’s an intuitive estimate of a feature’s size. 2. An estimate in points indicates a feature’s size relative to another, and does not give the illusion of being precise. 3. Over time, and using consistent iterations (e.g. 2-week sprints), you get a strong feel for how many points a team can deliver in an iteration.
Some agile teams use Fibonacci numbers to do this. Using Fibonacci adds an element of science to the concept of estimating using points, adding the laws of distribution as a dimension. If you’re interested in understanding more about the scientific background of Fibonacci numbers – which weren’t invented for agile development by the way! Kelly. See also:How to estimate your product backlog Home. Scrum Tools Roundup. Working this weekend on some new SharePoint stuff which you’ll see in a few weeks but thought I would pull together a list of tools to help people with Scrum. These are tools that help you plan iterations, keep track of your updates, and generally make life easier for the ScrumMaster or those working on Scrum projects.
Not to say a plain old whiteboard with post-it notes or Microsoft Excel won’t do the trick, but these tools take you a little bit farther and help you keep track of things holistically. Some are open source, others are not so check them out if you’re looking for something extra to add to your Scrum process. Where noted, I’ve given some suggestions about using these tools where I’ve already taken a look at them for you, but please make up your own mind with your own eval if you’re serious about a product (especially one that costs $$$).
ScarabJava server based artifact tracking system, highly customizable. Distributed under a BSD/Apache style license.