Monthly Archives: September 2007
Kanban Ground Rules Example for a Specific Team
Kanban System for Software Engineering Kanban System for Software Engineering – KSSE Introduction Definitions Roles Acronyms Metrics Queue sizes Process Getting Things into TIP and on through to production Self-organization Get Things Done Releasing Constraints Other Interesting Work Kaizen Generating and Verifying Acceptance Criteria Stand-up Measures of Success Visual tracking Tradeshow For Finished Features Retrospective Regular Cadence Whole Team Incentives Introduction Kanban (in kanji where kan, means “visual,” and ban, means “card” or “board”) is a concept related to lean and just-in-time (JIT) production. Kanban is a signaling system. As its name suggests, Kanban historically uses cards to signal the … Continue reading
Leading a Retrospective Before Introducing Kanban to a Team
Introduction On September 25th I facilitated a Product-level retrospective. The purpose of this retrospective was to look back at how user stories find their way to production, and to find ways to shorten the process and increase quality. The format of the retrospective was taken directly from the book Agile Retrospectives. This style can be used on iteration/release/product cycles. It breaks the meeting down in to 5 components: Set the Stage, Gather Data, Generate Insights, Decide What To Do, and Closing. There are many activities which can be used to help with each phase. Choosing the correct activities becomes much … Continue reading
Impediments Need to be Removed, Not Excused
I find that a lot of times in the stand up, most people do not raise impediments. Do people feel this reflects badly on their performance? Because when they do, I see a reaction by the team to just brush it off. Something like this: Developer states, “Yesterday I worked on the sensitive content module. I’m not quite done because I am still waiting on legal to review the verbiage, since it is so sensitive. So today, I’ll work on the uploading pictures module.” Someone else on the team says, “Yeah, those people in Legal can be slow, I had … Continue reading
Naked Planning Explained – Kanban in the Small
While attending Agile2007 I kept finding myself in the company of Arlo Belshee, especially as he was going through his implementation of a Kanban System at BlueTech LLC. The conversations became for me one of the stand out ideas discussed at the conference. This process might have started when Arlo really got in to the lean literature and looked around for waste in the Scrum system. He believed he found it in estimation. The amount estimated to work always differs from actual amount worked, is therefore supposition and only a guess, so this estimation was declared muda. There are a … Continue reading