One of the questions I’m asked quite frequently is what is the right ratio between developers and testers. A variant on that question is what I typically see in other organizations as the ratio. Well lets answer the second variant and then try to deal with the first. Typically what we see in agilesparks customers …
I will be speaking in Lean Kanban 2010 in Belgium. I’m excited about the agenda and connecting to the Lean/Kanban community in Europe. It will also give me a chance to give a visit to my recent Kanban team in Utrecht and see how they are doing :-)
I’ve been listening to podcasts for some years now. reversim (רברס עם פלטפורמה) is a podcast by Ran and Ori, two kibutzniks talking about all things Software Engineering, in Hebrew. I had the pleasure of having a chat with Ran and Ori a few weeks ago about Agile, Kanban, Agilesparks, Lean Startups, and some other things. …
Dennis Stevens wrote a wonderful blog post called Kanban and when will this be done where he talks about how to forecast done dates in a kanban environment and how kanban looks at estimates, unperdictability, and how to make commitments. I think its a great post, go read it!!! After you're done, try to think …
For those interested in Kanban and still reading those actual things you hold in your hands and spend several hours on, David Anderson’s new Kanban book is out there… As David provided Agilesparks with the draft manuscript to help us prepare for a Kanban Coaching Workshop we had with him back in February, I was …
It seems like new uses for Kanban are cropping up every day. One of those ideas is to use Kanban in order to drive Continuous Improvement efforts.
Lately I’ve been trying to understand how best to represent Known Unknowns (KU) stories/tasks in the BDC. I’m talking about things like Support cases from customers – things not related to stories from the backlog essentially, that you know you will need to address. I’m wondering how the burndown chart should reflect those.
Getting the user stories on the right size, in the right format, in essence getting to the sprint in a READY-READY form (READY actually means READY, not make-believe READY…) requires a lot of cooperation from the Product Owner/Manager. He should understand the value he gets if he INVESTs in stories/features, because it DOES create work …
While a lot of what affects an agile team is within the team’s scope of responsibility, the key antipattern I’m talking about today sort of isn’t… A big factor on whether a team can be effective is the size of stories/features on its backlog. A lot of good things happen when stories are Small (See …
My latest blog post was about the costs and challenges of iterations, as well as what to do to overcome them. One of the other things I’m working on is Kanban. I believe Kanban is a great fit to many teams and situations. Specifically doing Scrumban is a great way to get the benefits of …