kanban

The Agile Lowest Common Denominator – Avoiding a slowdown due to the weakest link

One of the concerns often raised when people hear about kanban is that the weakest/slowest link will slow down the whole chain. For example if testing is a bottleneck what will happen is that the whole chain will accommodate its pace. Similarly in scrum a team that actually does realistic planning will commit to a …

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How I would simulate time-boxed agile in the @getkanban kanban board game

At Agilesparks we’ve recently been using the Kanban Board Game developed by Russell Heally (@getkanban) quite extensively. We use it as part of Kanban courses, sessions for Scrum teams that want to learn about Kanban, Kanban teams that are already working and want to raise their game, as well as in Kaizen sessions for project …

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LeanSSC/Kanban US conference 2011 – #LSSC11 – Are you coming?

  The Lean Software and Systems Consortium US-based community conference will be May 3-6 next year, in Long Beach California. I'll be there, talking about  "Using Kanban and CFD to effectively manage Agile Testing" For some initial ideas in that area you can checkout earlier blog posts as well as  http://www.slideshare.net/yyeret/using-kanban-and-cfd-to-effectively-manage-agile-testing The Lean Software and Systems Conference is the Kanban conference …

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Collaborating with specialized roles using kanban classes of service

  I want to share a solution I came up with together with a team of performance / non-functional testing, working in a product group in a large enterprise. This solution deals with the challenge of bridging the principles of "Those who build the system test it", "Non functional testing is a collaboration role", and …

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How to use kanban and lean concepts to effectively manage agile testing end to end

I recently have been working on an agile testing training. Why is it relevant here? Because one of the modules I’m most fond of (not surprisingly) introduces kanban and CFD as a way to deal with some common problems that occur around testing once you start to work feature-driven (agile). check it out.    Any …

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Want my elevator-pitch answer to what is Kanban for a Scrum rookie?

  Our coaching team at agilesparks runs into this question a lot.  Many of the teams we are working with are familiar with Scrum and using it. Other teams are just now going into Scrum.  Since kanban is becoming a hot buzzword, we often get asked – so what is this kanban thing? How is …

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If productivity experts tell me to keep email closed most of the day – why shouldn’t I avoid looking at defects for most of the release?

Isn’t it more efficient to wait till the end of the release and then all together handle all the bugs? One way to think about it is that you probably prefer to answer emails throughout the day rather than at the end; you want to deal with bugs during the sprints. Of course, I fully …

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Encouraging Feature-level progress tracking in Kanban

One of the key questions project managers and senior management in general ask themselves and their teams on an ongoing basis is – "Are we on track to deliver the scope we committed to, on time". In some environments "on budget" is added to the question. If you are talking about a Release Scope, the answers are …

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Can we PLEASE have some simple measures for our Product Development group?

A lot of my clients ask me how to measure their effectiveness. Some of them are already using Agile styles of product development, others are not yet there, and another important variant is the Enterprise with mixed ways of doing things, that wants to get more visibility, and use measures as a way to drive …

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MMF driven sprints in a Kanban world

The more experience I get with Kanban, and the more I talk about it with people, I see that one of the main challenges is maintaining some form of goal-driven cadence that energizes the team. If every one of your Kanban Cards/Stories is an independent goal (e.g. a support environment) its easy to connect to …

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