Once people start to get “Stop Starting Start Finishing” thinking (Kanban) or the “Focus on the current sprint” thinking (Scrum) a frequent question that comes up is how to deal with people who are required for different activities throughout the work life cycle. Some example scenarios: “I’m a tester who both participates in ATDD spec. …
How can we make promises we can keep without a commitment to the sprint content? So I convinced you that the Scrum Sprint Commitment is not such a great idea. I convinced you it is mainly there for learning. You want to move to a commitment to try to meet the forecast instead of committing …
Disclaimer – I’m a well-known Scrum Sprint Commitment basher. But in the last few weeks especially while processing the Lean Conference Boston Keynote by Steven Spear I have a fresh perspective I wanted to share. There is no improvement without learning One of Spear’s key points was that there is no improvement without learning. There is …
I just wrote a lengthy reply on a kanbandev thread about Using Scrum to implement Kanban and vice versa and thought I would share it here, especially so I can tweet it directly and try to spark a discussion about it in Scrum Gathering Atlanta (where I’m currently at…) I engaged the conversation when Danko said: …
Background 3 years ago in Agile Israel 2009 I talked about ScrumBan. The slideshare presentation has been one of most popular ones, and remarkably enough it is the second hit on google when searching for ScrumBan. Go figure… Anyhow from time to time people ask me where they can go look up what Scrumban is …
Background Scrum teams often finish sprints out of breath, out of quality, and out of joy. You also see teams that start the sprint full of numbing fear, set a low bar and that low bar becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Add to that Product Owners, Scrum Masters and managers all spending precious time worrying about …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.