Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
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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 …
There’s been some discussion recently on InfoQ and in the XP Yahoo! Group, as to whether estimation could or should be considered as waste. My recent view has been that estimation is waste, but I think I am refining that position to be that “traditionally recognised” estimation is waste, and that there are subtleties which mean that some sort of …
One of the metaphors I use when I talk why a kanban system has work-in-progress (WIP) limits, is traffic jams. The greater the WIP, the lower the throughput, and this effect can be seen when too many cars clog up a motorway. Watching the BBC’s “Britain from Above” last night, they had an interesting section on this subject, including a …
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 …
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 …