Support the Agile Fringe

Agile 2008 was driven by the vision of a music festival (e.g. Glastonbury).  In the same way that music festivals encourage new and emerging acts, Agile 2008 had a Breaking Acts stage with the same goals.  Agile 2008 also had a Questioning Agile stage in order to be transparent and encourage debate about Agile.  Agile 2009 has lost both these …

Managers' Introduction to TDD at Agile2008

InfoQ has just published a video of myself and Dave Nicolette’s presentation at Agile2008 – A Managers’ Introduction to Test Driven Development

Kanban and the New New Product Development Game

One of the primary origins of Scrum is “The New New Product Development Game” by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review in 1986.  This is the article in which the contrast is made between a traditional sequential or “relay race” approach and a holistic or “rugby” approach. Hence  the name Scrum was derived.  As part …

A wedge of Oxford Isis mature cheese.

Is Kanban Only Suitable for Mature Teams?

Another hot topic around Kanban is whether it is only suitable to use with mature agile teams. In terms of Shu Ha Ri, is kanban a Ri process, or can it be a Shu, or even Ri process? A good description of Shu Ha Ri can be found here.  To summarise, the concept comes from the Japanese martial art Aikedo …

Kanban, Flow and Cadence

Intro There has been some noticeable increase in interest in Kanban recently, with a number of people asking for more basic info, and more people writing new blogs and articles.  This is my attempt to describe in more detail my take on it all, which I refer to as Kanban, Flow and Cadence. Kanban – Controlled Work Flow – Effective …

Page Updates

A couple of page updates for the blog: Calendar – I’ve added two new upcoming conferences that I’m going to be speaking about “Kanban, Flow and Cadence” at.  They’re XPDay08 and SPA2009. Kanban – I’ve created a new page to pull together various references on Kanban for Software Development.

Agile Business Conference 2008 Review

The conference was opened by BBC’s Ian Palmer, who also hosted Day 1, and he began by making the analogy between delivering a software project and delivering a news story.  There is a deadline, and a budget, but at the end of the day, its the story that’s important. Keynote: Peter Morowski – Senior VP R&D Borland – Driving Agile …

Agile Business Conference 2008

I’m going to be at the Agile Business Conference this week, primarily to give another performance of “A Manager’s Guide to Test Driven Development” with Dave Nicolette.  I’ll try and blog highlights here again, and if you’re there, please say hello.  I’ll be looking for any opportunity to talk about Kanban I can find!

My Recipe For Success

I’ve been doing more introductory Agile and Scrum training recently, and have been thinking about the best way to get across the core ideas that underpin Agile.  I find the Manifesto Values a bit too woolly, and the Principles too wordy, to be immediately meaningful.  At the same time, David Anderson has blogged again about Recipes for Success.  I’ve decided …

Kanban and Retrospectives

Following a couple of threads recently on the kanbandev Yahoo! group, I thought I’d try and put down my experiences and thoughts on the subject. In a timebox-based agile process, such as Scrum or XP, the retrospective typically happens at the end of the iteration, and is one of the items coupled to the iteration cadence.  Removing the iteration, and …