Category: kanban

State of Agile

October 9, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

Seems like there's lots going on in the agile world right now. Lots of talk about Lean and it's impact on Agile. Lots of attacks going on at the CSM certification. Kanban is all over the news these days. And just last week, I read about a new Agile methodology called Stride.

So how do we make sense of this all?

My opinion is that there is value in each of the methodologies (for the purposes of this blog I'll refer to them all as methodologies even though some of you might not think of them as such). It's real important to read about them all so that you are armed with enough knowledge to know what's out there. I see this as a toolset from which you can choose for your specific situation.

Burndown charts - It's not about staying below the line

June 13, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction
I recently participated in a Scrum development discussion thread on Yahoo Groups where one member new to Scrum asked the following: "Our burndown chart's remaining work line always goes up. As a Scrum Master, what do I have to do to make it go down?" This question, surprisingly, generated a lot of response from the community. I found it puzzling to see how adamant some were to introduce solutions to get the remaining work line to go below the estimated work line.

Kanban Development

May 1, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

The experts in our industry have an amazing ability of inventing sexy names for simple things that are as old as my cooking pots.

An example:

I am responsible for our company's intranet application, of which I try to release a new version every month. I have more or less given up on planning of this project, because I work on it whenever there's time. And time, unfortunately, is always in short supply. One month I may be too busy managing dual, triple and quadruple monitors for developers, following up on SharePoint upgrade disasters, or seeking the best tool for tracking surprise features (others call them bugs), while another month I spend all my time training mandrills to mimic the behavior of senior software engineers. All in all, just your typical CIO stuff.

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