Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
Agile 2008 is almost here and I’m looking forward to presenting 3 sessions this year. Managers Introduction to Test Driven Development (with Dave Nicolette) Wednesday 6th, 16:00 – 17:30, Civic Ballroom South, Customers & Business Value Stage The purpose of this session is to help non-technical managers understand the business value of one of the popular agile software development techniques. …
I’ve been involved in a number of discussions about how User Experience work fits into an Agile process. As a result a trying to articulate my position, I’ve come up with the following explanation of the anatomy of an MMF. The following diagrams assume the following key: Lets start by looking at a typical waterfall model: In this case, all …
One of my background areas of interest is the use of musical metaphors to describe agile software development. I’m a classically trained musician, and I’m always surprised by the number of other musicians I meet in the agile community. I can’t help thinking that the training and experience gained by musicians is applied by them in their software careers. I …
One of the regular questions I get asked when I talk to people about KFC Development is about how it is different. As a result I came up with a set of KFC Consequences to try and help articulate this. Kanban Consequence – Eliminate backlogs, timeboxed iterations and estimates. Eliminate might be a slightly strong word, but there is certainly …
Allan Kelly blogged recently about whether kanban systems trade predictability for efficiency. Its an interesting viewpoint, but I’m not entirely sure I agree! Firstly, I don’t believe any agile process gives predictability. One of the reasons for preferring agile methods is that software development just isn’t predictable. Rather, I would say that agile methods can give reliability and that both …
Liz Keogh says “RIP As a… I want… So that…” (via David Anderson). This also ties in with what Chris Matts has being describing as Feature Injection. What I like about this idea is that it provides the link between the MMF and the User Story. Liz proposes a new format: In order to <achieve some value> As a <role> …
The final morning of the conference was faily quiet again. I did go to “The Agile Technique Hour” which was fun and interesting. David Parsons has posted the materials online, but in brief, we were split into teams in order to deliver features, which were drawings on functionality on overhead acetate. The features were integrated by overlaying the acetate sheats. …
An excellent workshop by Mary and Tom Poppendieck today entitled “Stop Thrashing: Pull Schedule Techniques for Level Workflow”. It really left me buzzing, for two reasons. Firstly, Mary talked about her real experiences implementing a kanban system at 3M which was fascinating, and secondly, I ended up being invited up to the front to share my experiences with implementing a …
Dave Snowden‘s keynote was entertaining and interesting, although quite a lot of it went over my head. Dave talked about the need to understand why something works in order for it to scale, with reference to agile development. His work covers Complex Adaptive Systems, Cognitive Systems and Evolutionary Phsycology and Anthropology. Some points which stuck out for me were: Adopt …
I went to Jeff Patton‘s tutorial on User Story Mapping this afternoon. I first met Jeff in London last year at XP Day and the Scrum Gathering. We talked about kanban, and his ideas, and the two seemed very compatible, so I was keen to see how they matched in more detail. Jeff has also been working with former Yahoo! …