Tag Archives: Lean
Finding and Releasing a Product Development Bottleneck
With iterative software, we talk about doing all the necessary functions, such as Design, Develop, Inspect, and Release, within each cycle to increment the value of available software to the customer. Our team divides the things in progress in to these categories, and has a finite amount of slots available to each category. Friday after the daily stand-up found me, the Product Owner (PO) and the Lead Developer discussing a constraint to work. The Design category is done with its work, but the ready slot for Development is full. The team cannot pull any work in to this area. The … Continue reading
Carnival of Agilists – 9/20/07
A little while ago I received the following email: Dear agile bloggers, Your recent blog post, reference or article has been referenced in the latest Carnival of Agilists – the blogroll pointing you to some of the latest thoughts in the agile community. The carnival is a biweekly blog posting rotated through the agile community to point others seeking to learn more through agile practitioners. The source for the carnival posting this week is at http://trailridgeconsulting.com/blog/?p=99 It is also referenced at the Agile Alliance Carnival located at http://www.agilealliance.org/show/1670 Thanks for your contributions and feel free to spread the word through additional … Continue reading
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
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