Self Improvement: There Is No End State When Transitioning to Agile
I am a strong believer in Self Improvement, constant learning, and continuous improvement. As such I really enjoyed this article from Mike Cohn where he describes how Agile adoption is process with no end state that needs to be tailored to your organization needs.
[via Mike Cohn's Blog]
Kanban – The Next Step in the Agile Evolution?
I am interested in everything that can help improve my teams' productivity and consequently helps us provide better value to our customers. As such, I have started reading about Kanban, a project management methodology that appears to "compete" with Scrum. Scrum is the methodology that I am currently using.
Scrum is an iterative method that provides incremental value to stakeholders at the end of each iteration. The product owner provides requirements at the beginning of each iteration. During the iteration, the team designs, implements, tests, documents, debugs new features based on those requirements. At the end of the iteration, the team demonstrates the new features to the product owner who accept or reject them.
Kanban on the other hand, is not an iterative process. The product owner provides ranked list of requirements. The team pulls requirements from top of the list one at a time. The team designs, implements, tests, documents, debugs new features based on those requirements. The product owner review the new features as soon as they are produced.
Project Management Hut presents an article describing Kanban as the next step in Agile Evolution.
Two worthy Agile methodologies articles
Here are two Agile articles that I found interesting, and would like to share with you.
On his blog, Kai Gilb has started a series of posts entitled "7 truths about Agile and Scrum that people don't want to hear" The first part, Wrong Focus, describes how developers should focus on providing value to stakeholders rather than creating software for the sake of developing software. It also states that the Agile Manifesto may be a cause for this wrong focus. For my part, I believe that while the creation of value falls in the developers realm, the definition of this value and its correlation with the stakeholders wants and needs is the responsibility of the Product Owner. Kai's article is very good and I am looking forward to the six other parts.
In another seven posts series, Jack Milunsky introduces us to Lean Development and describes how seven manufacturing wastes (In-process Inventory, Over-Production, Extra Processing, Transportation, Motion, Waiting, Defects) matches wastes in software development (Partially done work, Extra Features, Relearning, Handoffs, Task Switching, Delays, Bugs). His articles are well structured and informative.
Agile vs. Waterfall: A Tale of Two Teams
We are using Agile methodologies at work and I was looking for ways to explain the fundamental differences between those two development methodologies. It turns out that this video is pretty good at doing just this. Enjoy...
