Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
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! …
I’m at XP2008 in Limerick this week. Today was pretty quiet as its all tutorials for the first couple of days, which cost extra, so I didn’t actually go to anything. However, I did hang around and catch up with some old friends. In particular, I had an interesting chat with Tom Poppendieck about my experiences with kanban systems. Tom …
I’m really pleased to have had a number of submissions accepted for various conferences this year. I’ve added details onto my Calendar page. In particular I’ve had 3 talks accepted for Agile2008 in Toronto, one of which is a workshop called KFC Development. I’m really looking forward to sharing my thoughts and getting feedback from attendees which I hope will …
I gave a short presentation at the Agile North April Mini Conference last Saturday. It was a great half day, and possibly the first Agile conference without any reference to Scrum or XP! Just Real Options and Kanban with Portia Tung, Pascal Van Cauwenbergh, David Anderson and myself. I’ve added my slides to the downloads page. The talk was also …
I’ve been referring to my latest thinking on development process as KFC Development. Its a bit of a gimmicky name, which makes it memorable, but there is some meaning behind it. KFC stands for Kanban, Flow and Cadence – three lean concepts which I think are important and complementary. Kanban – Kanban is the mechanism which controls the workflow and …
In a recent post on kanban-esque scheduling, Brian Marick asked whether using a kanban system to manage software development has enough discipline, and in particular whether there is enough commitment to deliver. I’ve been working on ways to answer this, and recently came to a conclusion, when David Anderson reminded me that Corey Ladas has already said the same thing, …
Prior to September 2007, my team was using traditional Scrum; a t-shirt sized and prioritised Product Backlog, two week Sprints begun with a two hour planning meeting and ended with a two hour review and retrospective meeting, and Sprint Burndown and Velocity as the primary metrics. However, despite the team completing Product Backlog Items every sprint, and making regular releases, …