This is a story about merging two teams. One was using a physical Kanban board and the other was using an electronic one. Of course we were discussing the pros and cons of electronic versus physical boards. My role in the discussion was pretty funny: I used to be a very strong fan of physical [...]
Kanban – Scheduling system for telling us what, when & how much to produce
Devised in the late 1940′s by Toyota for operating their shop floor production line, Kanban helps lean IT stay focused. Typically implemented on a physical board prominently displayed in the company, this method of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) also betters production lines through rigorous application of continuous improvement.
Imagine you’re driving your car through uncharted territory to a destination only vaguely described by “That Guy” who told you to go there. “That Guy” was kind enough to give you an absolutely non-negotiable deadline too. With that in mind, you race to the first waypoint – you should already be able to see it [...]
This is a guest post by Boris Gloger (@borisgloger) A couple of days ago I commented on Matthias’ post about the myth that Scrum forces a team to release new functionality only after a sprint is finished while Kanban would is more flexible. I wanted to know the difference between Scrum and Kanban, and why [...]
In the heat of introducing agile practices like daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives, unit testing, or defining “Done”, you can get easily overwhelmed by all the new and shiny ideas. It’s a real danger that implementing these new practices creates huge overheads, slows you down, and frustrates the team. They forget why you actually introduced agile [...]
Product development needs consistency The basic idea of Scrum is to create a safe and change-free environment to enable a team to concentrate on the planned development tasks. The team plans out a sprint of typically two weeks and the idea is that they work uninterrupted during this period. This process really helps to get [...]
Quite often, IT managers see Scrum as the solution to increase the speed of software development. Indeed, you can speed up your software development processes dramatically by successfully using Scrum for organizing your engineering department. But, people often forget that they can only create value for their customers if they optimize the whole organization towards [...]
When inflexible and wasteful processes are making your organization inefficient, it’s time to introduce agile methodologies. Scrum vs. Kanban then becomes an essential question: Which one is better suited for my own situation?
Scrum is a great framework for organizing projects. It defines exact roles and procedures to structure your work environment. You gain a lot of visibility and you empower your teams. All that is great. But in software development or operations it’s not sufficient. You need an underlying set of values and practices which drive quality [...]
A lot of people I meet are interested in agile software development. Either they’ve heard about it or they participate in projects which use Scrum, Kanban, or Extreme Programming. They wonder whether it makes sense to do pair programming, which Kanban tools to use, how to get started with test driven development or how to [...]
