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Yuval Yeret

Kanban development oversimplified: a simple explanation of how Kanban adds to the ever-... - 0 views

  • It’s a lot easier to estimate a story that’s small — which can lead to more accurate estimates, and better predictability.
  • It’s easier to plan with smaller stories. With big stories — stories that might take weeks for a developer to implement — it becomes difficult to plan a development time-box — particularly when the iterations are only a couple of weeks. It seems that only a couple stories fit — and there’s often room for half a story — but how do you build half a story? Splitting them into smaller stories makes it easier to plan those time-boxes.
  • Shrinking stories forces earlier elaboration and decision-making. Where product owners could write their stories fairly generally and consider many of the details later, now breaking them down into smaller stories forces more thinking earlier in a planning lifecycle.
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  • Managing little stories forces us to keep better track of how they fit together. Product owners are often asked to break down stories to a level where a single story becomes meaningless. To keep track of what’s meaningful to them and other stakeholders, they often need to keep track of bigger items such as the features of the product and how many stories contribute to building up that feature.
  • The result of these herniated time-box activities is a cycle that’s actually 3-4 times longer than our time-box. To get work done, we’ll use a time-box to elaborate stories, one to develop them, another to more thoroughly test them, and if there are bugs, possibly another to fix them.
  • Anyone who’s attended an Agile planning meeting knows they can often last about an hour longer than you can stand it
  • It’s difficult to fit thorough validation of the story into a short time-box as well. So, often testing slips into the time-box after. Which leaves the nasty problem of what to do with bugs� which often get piped into a subsequent time-box.
  • During an ideal Agile time-box we’ll have frequent discussions between developers, testers, and those on a product owner team — like business analysts, user experience people, and business people. We’ll do this to understand what we need to build and describe what we’ll do to validate the story was really done. When time-boxes are short, there’s less time for this conversation. It’s common to move many of the conversations to detail the story and describe acceptance to the time-box before so we can be ready to really get moving with development when the time-box starts.
  • As time-boxes shrink those on the product owner team and testers find themselves in a constant mode of getting ready for a next time-box and evaluating past time-boxes
  • “Kan” means visual, and “ban” means card or board.
  • Kanban cards are used to limit the amount of inventory the factory builds. It doesn’t do the Toyota factory any good to build doors faster then they can assemble cars. It just wastes money on excess doors, and parts of doors. Excess work in progress is considered to be waste in Lean manufacturing. (It’s probably waste in non-Lean manufacturing too.) In the above completely made up example, you’ll never have more than 15 finished doors hanging around. (Mudha is Japanese for waste. Learn it to impress your Lean friends.)
  • work long hours, attend lots of meetings, and seem to have less time to be available to help developers with the current time-box. Since their focus is on a future or past time-box, questions about this time-box seem like interruptions. Collaboration decreases and tensions increase. Their work load is heavy, bumpy, not smooth or even.
  • Kanban thinking in software development attempts to do a similar thing. We want to limit unnecessary work in progress to be no higher than it needs to be to match the throughput of the team.
  • In Kanban development: time-boxed development is out stories are larger and fewer estimation is optional or out completely velocity is replaced by cycle time
  • Exactly what’s left of Agile if we get rid of time-boxes, change the meaning of stories, and stop measuring velocity. And, exactly what do car doors and Kanban cards have to do with software development? Don’t get hung up on process. Remember, agile development isn’t a process.
  • These columns aren’t set. You should discuss with your team the phases that stories go through to be completed. Some organization may use columns for writing documentation, or preparing customer service people to support the feature in production.
  • You might have a column where business analysts spend time tracking down technical details that developers need to understand to write code.
  • The top is used for stories currently in progress in that phase. The bottom is the buffer. When work for that phase of the story is completed, it moves from “in progress” to the “buffer” where it’ll wait to be pulled into the next phase.
  • When we set limits for work in progress, we’ll set a total number for the process step that includes both “in process” and the “finished buffer” for that process step.
  • Stories must be minimal marketable features
  • To be marketable the feature needs to be large enough to be useful — probably larger than the teeny stories that take a couple days to build and seem to be best practice in Agile development today. A MMF may take weeks to build. But the important thing isn’t how long it takes to build, but that it be understandable and valuable to those who’ll receive it. To identify a MMF some folks ask the question “Would I announce it in my company’s product blog?” If it’s too tiny to mention, then it’s not a MMF.
  • To be lean, we’ll limit the number of stories we allow onto the board. A common formula is to add up all the members of the team in all roles and divide by two. All roles includes developers, analysts, user interfaced designers, testers, deployment people — anyone immediately responsible for getting features to market. For example, if team members total 20, we might limit the number of MMF-style stories on the board to 10.
  • Today developers have finished a story, and s they walk to the Kanban board to move it out of development, they notice their single buffer slot is full — and the “testing in progress” column is filled to its limit. What now? The developers talk to the testers. “We’re really struggling to keep up here. It’ll be till tomorrow morning before we can get some of these stories moved out.” “Hmm�” says a developer “Can we help test?” “Of course you can!” says the tester. “With your help we can get these cleared out by the end of the day.“ The tester grins “I just don’t want you validating a story you implemented.”
  • For the limits of the story process steps, the limit is often half the number of people that can perform the work for that phase of development. For instance if you have 6 developers, you might limit the development in progress column to 3. Now, this will force developers to work together on stories. I do find in practice that this may not work out for all teams — so I often see limits that equal the number of developers (or those that can perform the process step) or often 1.5 * the number of people in a role. Of course if you do this, it’ll raise the overall work in progress — and as you might expect, items will take longer to finish.
  • When a column in a Kanban board is full, we know that group is at capacity. We also know that if this keeps happening that that process step is likely where a bottleneck is.
  • If you’ve ever waited in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland you might remember signs along the way that say “Your wait time from here is 30 minutes” — something like that. Now you can post your own wait times on your Kanban board. At the bottom of your story queue post the average cycle time with wait time. It’ll say something like “Your wait time for a story here is approximately 18 days.” At the top of the queue post the average working cycle time. It might say “your wait time from here is 14 days.”
  • But, since there’s no development time-box in Kanban development, we’ll measure story-by-story how long they took to complete — the “cycle time” of the story.
  • When you place focus on how quickly you can get functionality done, and have the ability to measure just that, then the estimates don’t much matter. In fact, many using a Kanban approach have simply stopped estimating at all. Yes story sizes vary, but being able to give a wait time plus or minus a few days is sufficient for many organizations’ concerns.
  • Some do still estimate stories. Then use those estimates in conjunction with cycle time. Using a spreadsheet we can calculate the average cycle time for stories with a given estimate. If you do this, consider placing a handy chart next to your Kanban board showing estimate in one column, and wait times in adjacent columns. With this you’re answering the real question stakeholders are asking for when they get estimates: “when am I going to see this functionality in the software?”
  • The only difference is the cycles aren’t used to plan and commit to stories any longer.
  • If I know that during three week time period there where 15 working days and that 5 developers worked the entire time, that’s 75 developer days. Knowing that lets me calculate the average number of developer days per story: 3.4 (75/22) — Which is darn close to pi — which makes me believe it has to be right. ;-) This number, 3.4, is what XP practitioners referred to as load factor.
  • Evaluation cycles, not development time-boxes
  • If your stakeholders are like mine, they don’t want to know when they’re going to get this functionality, the want to know when they’re going to get all this functionality. I find that if I place stories into a spreadsheet with start and end dates, and calculate cycle time, if I select an arbitrary time period — say a two or three week time period — I can see how many stories where completed during this time period. For instance I might see the team finished 22 stories in 3 weeks — that’s about 7.3 stories per week. Given a backlog of 100 stories I can reasonably infer that it’ll take between 13 and 14 weeks (100/7.3). That’s yesterday’s weather for Kanban — at least the way I calculate it.
  • The daily standup or daily scrum meeting occurs as normal, but now it occurs in front of the Kanban board. Instead of the regular meeting ritual of checking in with each person to find out what they worked on yesterday and will work on today, the discussion revolves around the Kanban board and what will likely move on and off the board today, where “traffic” seems the heaviest, and what we could do to clear bottlenecks.
  • Reflect every few weeks
  • Lean practices help teams increase throughput. They don’t make developers type faster, rather they draw attention to bottlenecks that slow things down, help you see them and respond to them quicker. Using a Kanban board lets you easily visualize work in progress across different roles and lets you see when someone is taking on too much work simultaneously.
  • Demonstrate every few weeks
  • A task board as it’s commonly used in an agile approach can give you the visualization too. But, widening the task board to separate testing from development from acceptance or other process steps helps me better visualize where things are clogging up — helps me better diagnose problems. And, setting hard limits for process steps and respecting them really makes me deal with the problem in a way that dropping a pile of stories into a sprint or iteration didn’t. But, maybe it’s just me who’s lazy and avoids dealing with tough problems. I’m sure you’d never run into a situation where you and your team let lots of finished development work pile up waiting to be tested.
  • There’s no one as zealous as the newly converted There’s a lot of folks pretty excited about Kanban out there. I am too. Sometimes that zeal takes the form of telling people practicing common agile time-boxed development that they’re wrong. But, I guess I’m crusty enough to know that there’s lots of right ways to succeed and anyone who believes they’ve found the best ways is likely wrong. Don’t let those voicing opinions strongly for, or against, Kanban approaches stop you for digging in deeper and understanding the ideas behind it.
  •  
    one of the best articles about Kanban and its relation to Agile I've encountered so far - focusing on Feature development (not maintenance)
Yuval Yeret

Agile PMO Role - 0 views

  • Institute an agile transition team, and have the agile PMO play a significant role on that team. If you are starting on the journey, establishing an agile transition team can be a critical factor in your success. The agile transition team plans and implements the strategy for the organization’s agile transition (using a backlog, iterations, planning meetings, retrospectives and, in general, responding to change) This group monitors and communicates results throughout the organization, and is responsible for removing organizational level impediments. The PMO representative can act as ScrumMaster for the agile transition team. Members should be leaders representing different departments and functions that are impacted by the agile transition. For example, having leaders from development, QA, product development and the PMO is an excellent practice.
  • Establish a “Meta Scrum” that is tasked with mapping projects and features to corporate strategy. As part of optimizing the whole, it is important for there to be a big picture view across products and features. In general, product managers are tasked with defining, prioritizing and communicating the vision and features for their products. When you have a program that encompasses multiple products with multiple product owners and project teams, keeping everything in line with the corporate vision can sometimes be overlooked.   Unlike the Scrum of Scrums--which is tactical, i.e. focused on execution--the Meta Scrum is focused on the strategic planning and decisions guiding the program or programs as a whole. Establishing a Meta Scrum with the PMO representative acting as ScrumMaster to plan and facilitate meetings (as well as reporting and tracking decisions and action items) can add significant value in having a program able to rapidly respond to change while staying true to the corporate strategy and objectives.
  • I like using story points to establish the velocity of individual teams. From a program point of view, however, story points are difficult to use across multiple teams. The nut there is that one team’s story point is not equivalent to another team’s story point. To crack that nut, I use agileEVM to “normalize” to standard project management metrics like the Cost Performance Index and the Schedule Performance Index, as well as the Estimate At Complete in integrated dollars. These metrics can be aggregated across teams to establish progress against the plan for the entire program.
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  • Establish an agile CoachingCenter. It is important from an organizational perspective to continue to provide coaching and training to agile teams. Team development and facilitation needs continue after the initial shift to agile methods is completed. In addition, new team members are hired, new practices discovered and implemented. Establishing an agile coaching center of excellence can meet this need.   In order to be successful, the center needs to be a legitimate organization with an assigned budget, staff and objectives. The center can be a located within the agile PMO. The center can develop and manage a central agile library, produce various lunch ‘n’ learns and other programs to infuse agile values and knowledge across the organization, and provide proficient, independent facilitators to teams for various retrospectives and other needs. In addition, the center can help the team gather metrics on their agility and health so that the team can take action if the decide to.
Yuval Yeret

Negotiation Tactics - 0 views

  • In negotiation, there are many tactics that you may meet or use. They can be fair, foul or something in between, depending on the competitive or collaborative style of the people involved and the seriousness of the outcomes.
  • Behavior Labeling
  • Cards on the Table: State your case, clearly and completely.
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  • Go For A Walk: Take time out to change.
  • Fair Criteria: Set decisions criteria such that is is perceived as fair.
  • Expanding the Pie: Ensuring there's more for everyone.
  •  
    Cards on the Table:
Yuval Yeret

Do It Yourself Agile: Scrum and Kanban - Like Chocolate and Peanutbutter - 0 views

  • When doing Kanban, you still need to do the equivalent of planning, assignment, estimation, retrospectives, delivery, etc. In Kanban, all of these activities are decoupled from each other whereas in Scrum they are all coupled to the iteration boundary. How can this be applied to Scrum? Consider retrospectives. If you are just starting with Scrum, you probably have an iteration length of 1 month (or four weeks). From that it follows that you will have a retrospective once per month. If you eventually end up with an iteration length of 1 week, then it follows that you will have a retrospective every week. But this actually seems like the wrong way to set the cadence of retrospectives. Wouldn’t it be better to have the cadence of retrospectives meet the need for them? If it eventually makes sense to do a retrospective every week, doesn’t it make sense to get the benefit of them on a weekly basis when you are just starting Scrum?
Yuval Yeret

tips on reviving retrospectives from the retrospectives yahoo group - 0 views

  • Has the team made changes that make a difference to them as a result of the retrospective?
  • Has the team explored a variety of different topics/areas, or do they stick to pretty much the same agenda around continuous improvement? What is the balance of change/improvement work vs. working on the product?
  • For example, try looking at technical practices, teamwork, or customer relationships... choose what ever seems most relevant to bound the discussion. That might help the team dig deeper and find issues that have more significance for them (now...I'm sure the other changes were significant at the time).
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  • Try a 'speed retrospective'. How quickly can the team get together and find one good, solid improvement to make? Make it exciting and use a stopwatch. I wouldn't do this all the time, but again, what harm to try it once?
  • How about one retrospective where you set yourselves the challenge of generating actions from the "What did we do well" column? In other words, find an action designed to magnify an existing positive rather than remedy an existing negative.
  • How about a 'Show and Tell' retrospective where every team member comes to the meeting with an action item and its explanation already prepared? The retrospective would really be each person presenting their idea in turn.
  • How about a retrospective wherein you challenge yourselves to come with a new approach to retrospectives that is so exciting that people would skip other work activities to attend?
  • I find it very important to revisit the outcome of the past retrospective and celebrate the things the team had been able to do differently.
  • The major thing is to make the changes visible and memorizable for everyone and not assuming that people remember what they decided on in the last retro.
  • Another thing is that I would invite team members to take turns in facilitating the retro. So not always the same person runs the retro (this typically also changes the format and techniques a bit).
  • - Heartbeat Retrospective (google for Boris Gloger)
  • - Temperature Reading
  • - Team Radar Chart
  • - Our project / team / product ship - draw a ship on a flip chart, ask the team what moved the ship forward, what blocked it
  • Just to add a totally different direction: I've made good experiences with having a *long* retrospective every few months. The short retrospectives are great to see the trees and optimize the daily work. A two or even three day retrospective helps the team to step back and watch the forrest instead.
  • It is important to get at least one item done every sprint. If you do the retro, but don't implement any of the actions, this is a tremendous demotivator. Better one thing finished that you can celebrate than 5 unfinished things in the queue.
  • Variety is the spice of life, so some variation is essential to keep the freshnees. Change the moderator, do technical focus once, then organisational, then "improving the fun factor", then go back to a general retro.
Yuval Yeret

Agile Game Development: The Project Manager Role - 0 views

  • The Project Manager works with the Product Owner to insure that cost is always a consideration when evaluating the Product Backlog.
  • "Super Scrum Master"
  • Tracking costs, especially for production
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  • Facilitate the Product Owner's role (backlog maintenance and meetings)
  • Among the Project Manager's responsibilities:
    • Yuval Yeret
       
      sounds like what some organizations will call "Program Manager"
  • Tracking project risk
  • The Project Manager on a Scrum project has to be a Scrum expert and evangelist.
  • As each Scrum team on the project evolves their practices, the Project Manager will insure that they are continuing to work effectively with the other teams
  • One example of this would be the application of Test Driven Development and similar practices to build stability. It doesn't make sense for some teams to use TDD while others don't. The PM would have to step in and work with all the teams to insure that practices won't interfere or cancel each other out.
Yuval Yeret

Agile Product Manager in the Enterprise (5): Responsibility 3 - Maintain the ... - 0 views

  • The Roadmap consists of a series of planned release dates, each of which has a theme and a prioritized feature set.
  • While it is a simple thing mechanically to represent the Roadmap, figuring out the content for anything beyond the next release is another matter entirely. The topic of what else the team plans to ship and when can be a fascinating and contentious topic in agile
  • the easiest way to think about the Roadmap is that it is an output, rather than an input to the Release Planning process.
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  • The dates and themes for the next release are fixed. The features are prioritized and variable.
  • The teams can commit only to the features in the next upcoming release. Releases beyond the next, represent only a best estimate.
  • The Roadmap, then, is a “plan of intent” and is subject to change as development facts, business context and customer needs change. With respect to the upcoming release, perhaps the most important guidance is this:
  • Even though the team has committed to the objectives and we have agreed that the feature set cannot be guaranteed, it is a reasonable expectation that the agile teams will: 1) meet the date 2) accomplish the theme 3) deliver most of the features, and certainly the highest priority ones, with the requisite quality.
  • Anything less would be unprofessional and belie the power, discipline and accountability of our agile enterprise model. Moreover, it will eventually threaten our own empowerment, as failure to deliver will inevitably cause the implementation of various controls to “help us”!
Yuval Yeret

Tailor your Message To Gain Support for your Agile Initiative | Enabling Agility - 0 views

  • Connect Agile’s Benefits to your Company’s Priorities
  • aying that Agile is “better, faster, cheaper” may not be enough to cause a company to be willing to go through the often-painful process of cultural and process change.  You could implement Agile, but you could also try Six Sigma or Lean.  Saying that Agile is a general get-better remedy puts it in line with many other get-better methods.
  • f they don’t see a meaningful update from us, at least once a quarter, we’re going to get kicked out of the game.  We’ve all acknowledged that as we’ve gotten bigger, our processes have become more cumbersome and now is the time to do something about it.  Agile will give us the ability to regain that rapid pace of delivering innovations to market that we were know for in our early days.”
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  • ur last two releases have looked like me-too updates, where we are just barely keeping up with our competitors
  • We’ve been losing market share
  • If you can refer to a specific business issue and show the linkage, you are much more likely to get a receptive audience.  Here’s an example.
  • The CFO, developer and QA manager have different roles in the organization and their needs are different.  If you want to enlist their support, be sure you know who you are talking to and what they value.
  • Use Focused Messages for Key Individuals or Groups
  • certain volume of people who are enrolled in the idea of Agile before you’ll see adoption start to accelerate,
  • People have specific needs in their role and they want to understand how Agile will affect and benefit them directly.  
  • Developers, on the other hand, probably wants to know if they will have interesting work, the opportunity to learn new things and the ability to make an impact on the company’s products.
  • a QA manager is probably interested in hearing how Agile helps enrich the QA profession.
  • The focus isn’t on Agile, its on business, as it should be.
  • The easiest way to find out what interests someone is to ask them.  When you meet, leave plenty of time for talk.  Motoring through a well-rehearsed Agile presentation usually doesn’t work.  A lot of times I’ll have slides with me, but they are a backdrop for the conversation.  I’ll refer to slides when it helps move the conversation along, but otherwise don’t use them.  You might want to forget slides altogether and just draw things on a whiteboard as necessary.  This technique is particularly useful with an individual or a small group.  
  • Take it One Step Further: Collect Data to Gain Insight
  • you’ll be most effective tailoring your message if you invest some time conducting data through a series of structured interviews. 
  • First, you’ll need a small set of questions prepared for the interviews.  Here are some examples. What is working with our current methodology? What’s not working with our current methodology? How do you think Agile would help our organization? What concerns do you have about Agile?
  • Interview a wide range of people: developers, testers, business analysts, managers, product managers, senior management, project managers and someone from finance. 
  • When you conduct the interviews, it is good to have one interviewer who has the primary responsibility for talking and the other person who has the primary job of taking notes.  You can switch off roles each interview so no one person gets stuck in either role.  Here’s how I typically start off.  
  • stories that people tell about the organization and make sure you write them down
  • I put all of the information we’d gathered into a mind-mapping program (Mindjet) and grouped like things together.
  • Make sure you keep interesting stories intact.  Specifics will help you make your cases
  • When there’s numerical data, people engage with a presentation in an entirely different way than they do when there are stories.  I find stories more effective, but do what works for you.
  • As an Agile evangelist, you job is to get Agile deployed effectively.  Along the way there are many people will be willing to go out of their way to help if you effectively speak to their interests and concerns.
Yuval Yeret

Growth Facilitator role on an OpenAgile team | Agile Advice - Working With Agile Method... - 0 views

  • The responsibility of the Growth Facilitator is about more than simply prioritizing New Work goals and tasks. I see the role as contributing to the organizational culture, and helping to build the business in a sustainable way.
  • As Growth Facilitator, I am also responsible for guiding the team toward delivering greater value for our stakeholders. At Berteig Consulting, our stakeholders don’t just include the company’s owners. Our stakeholders include a wide range of groups, including customers, suppliers, employees, and our families, all without whose support nothing we do would be possible. Delivering value to our stakeholders requires that we keep them in mind when we commit to our tasks each week.
  • When I first started, I made goals that were broad, saying for example “to take care of our clients” or “to work at a sustainable pace.”
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  • Berteig Consulting can update the Certified ScrumMaster course content so that all CSM course participants receive the best value in the market.” As soon as I made the direction clear, the team self-organized and generated tasks required to achieve each goal.
  • As the Process Facilitator goes about helping the team overcome obstacles, it can become clear that the team needs to address a systemic challenge during one of the upcoming Cycles. The Growth Facilitator then states the need as a Cycle goal in a S.M.A.R.T. format, allows the team time to give feedback, and prioritizes the goal in the New Work list. When the goal is brought to a future Cycle Commitment Meeting, the team breaks the goal into tasks and solves the systemic obstacle that the Process Facilitator identified.
  •  
    Who is the Agilesparks Growth Facilitator? Who's the Process Facilitator for that matter? Interesting reading. Important aspect of managing self-organizing teams in my oppinion
Yuval Yeret

EE Times - Using agile methods in medical device development - 0 views

  • FDA and other regulatory agencies fundamentally want to see that your product has safety in mind. To do so, they require complete traceability through the hardware and software. There is even a fairly new standard, IEC 62304, adopted worldwide that is wholly focused on software traceability from requirements through architecture to tests.
  • Medical devices companies are going primarily agile to respond to change and effectively manage technical complexity by collaboratively building solutions with their partners and customers to ultimately deliver what the customer wants before the competition does.
  • demo the new functionality created after each iteration to your customers, using web-based meets. Using these tools enables you to get immediate feedback from your customers throughout the project. Continuous customer feedback reduces the risk of building the wrong solution. The fact is in most cases you can’t make the release cycle more frequent since it includes giving tests to regulatory agencies. This is a tedious process that makes sure the device is safe. Doing the whole release cycle more frequently can be way too time consuming.
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  • ou could also give a version to select customers as long as it will not be directly used for care or diagnosis on current patients. The idea there is the customer gets the current iteration in house for say a blood analyzer. They could load it with real patient data and test out the new functionality as long as it is not used to diagnose an existing patient, since it has not gone through regulatory
  • agile development has gotten so popular in medical device companies that the AAMI (Association of Medical Instrumentation) is currently working on new guidance for mapping agile to a medical standard called IEC 62304.
  • In conclusion, agile development works and is being used in medical device development. The issue is you need to have a good toolchain that allows for complete traceability across the entire lifecycle in order to comply with standards. It is also very important to integrate and test frequently. This, in turn, leads to the need for build automation. With all of this in place, agile development for medical devices becomes much easier to make work.
Yuval Yeret

Original Scrum-ban Article by Corey Ladas | Lean Software Engineering - 1 views

  • A problem with the basic index-card task board is that there is nothing to prevent you from accumulating a big pile of work in process. Time-boxing, by its nature, sets a bound on how much WIP that can be, but it can still allow much more than would be desirable.
  • then you need another mechanism to regulate the “money supply.” In our case, we simply write the quantity of kanban in circulation on the task board, and allocate new cards according to that limit.
  • You might have a simple principle like: prefer completing work to starting new work, or you might express that as a rule that says: try to work on only one item at a time, but if you are blocked, then you can work on a second item, but no more. In our example, that rule gives us an effective WIP limit of 6.
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  • Just because anybody can have more than one item in process doesn’t mean that everybody should have more than one item in process. A problem with our multitasking rule is that it locally optimizes with no consideration of the whole. An implicit total WIP limit of 6 is still more WIP than we should probably tolerate for our three workers. A limit of 4 of 5 total items in process at one time still allows for some multitasking exceptions, but disallows the obviously dysfunctional behavior of everybody carrying two items
  • The ready queue contains items that are pending from the backlog, but have high priority
  • Here we’ve broken down in-process into two states: specify and execute. Specify is about defining whatever criteria are necessary to determine when the work item can be considered complete. Execute is about doing the work necessary to bring that work item into a state which satisfies those criteria. We have split our previous WIP limit of 5 across these two states. Specify is considered to take less time in this case, so it is given a limit of 2. Execute consumes the remaining limit of 3. We might change this ratio as time goes on and our performance changes.
  • Adding the specify-complete column communicates to the team that a work item which was previously in the specify state is now ready to be pulled by anyone who wants to move it to the execute state. Work that is still in the specify state is not eligible to be pulled yet. If the owner of a ticket in the specify state wants to hand it off, he can put it in the complete buffer. If he doesn’t want to hand it off, he can move it directly into the execute state as long as capacity is available.
  • e will also need some agreement about what results to expect at each handoff. We can do that by defining some simple work standards or standard procedures for each state. These do not have to be complicated or exhaustive. Here, they are simple bullets or checklists drawn directly on the task board.
  • The next event we might consider for scheduling planning activities is the concept of an order point. An order point is an inventory level that triggers a process to order new materials. As we pull items from the backlog into the process, the backlog will diminish until the number of items remaining drops below the order point. When this happens, a notice goes out to the responsible parties to organize the next planning meeting. If our current backlog is 10, our throughput is 1/day, and we set an order point at 5, then this planning will happen about once a week.
Yuval Yeret

How to make a LOT more money using agile - 0 views

  • How to make a LOT more money using agile
  • More frequent releases
  • expectations must be set for releases to be smaller but still have significant marketable value.  It also means managing scope for smaller releases so the value can actually be delivered to meet the expectations.  If we make the assumption these two pre-requisites can be handled, then we can also assume faster releases are possible.  Yes, I know, releasing software is expensive, requires other groups, etc.  For now, let’s assume all of those costs are negligible compared to the potential results and see where we end up.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • team of 8 people work on a project for a year with an anticipated ROI of 100% after 2 years.
  • $1,000,000 (approximately) in 12 months to build the product
  • get $2,000,000 in revenue within the 12 months following release.
  • ROI is calculated as $profit/$invested which in this case is ($2,000,000-$1,000,000)/$1,000,000 or 100%
  • cash expended, which in this case exactly matches the investment since we did all of the investment prior to receiving any return.
  • Let’s assume that scope can be managed so the product can be delivered in two phases, each taking 6 months.
  • each piece of the product is worth about half of the revenue value of the complete product
  • 6 months at an investment of $500,000 to build the first piece
  • 6 more months at an additional cost of $500,000 to complete the second half
  • after 6 months revenue starts to be brought in for the first release
  • the amount of revenue during the first 6 months of release of the first half of the product would be $500,000 ($2,000,000 for full product for 12 months = $500,000 for half product for 6 months).
  • matches the cost for building the second half of the product, so the cash expended is actually only $500,000 for building the product vs. $1,000,000 for building the product in one step.
  • After phase 2 of the product is completed it too starts to bring in revenue.  We now have the complete product, so we can get full value of it during each time period.  In other words, during the next 12 months it will generate $2,000,000 in revenue.  This brings total revenue to $2,500,000 which means our ROI is now 300% (higher profit divided by smaller investment - $1,500,000 profit / $500,000 invested).
  • Month Expense Revenue Cash (Profit) Total Revenue 6 $500,000 $0 -$500,000 $0 12 $500,000 $500,000 -$500,000 $500,000 24 $0 $2,000,000 $1,500,000 $2,500,000
Yuval Yeret

Permanent Link to Feature Flow - Increasing velocity using Kanban - 1 views

  • team that had some problems getting their process right
  • their velocity was decreasing and spirits were low. Luckily we managed to change our process by changing some basic Scrum practices and replacing some of them with Lean practices, inspired by the new Kanban articles and presentations. Productivity is now higher than ever and we can now focus on what really matters: product quality and customer satisfaction.
  • one major issue: getting things done. The major symptom was the frustration of management and the team with the project. The first 3-week time box (sprint) ending with about 30% (!) of all features still in progress, when, of course, they should all have been done and ready for shipment.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • existing solution to this problem was to lower the expected velocity each sprint, so the next sprint would be on-time. But at the end of next sprint, the same problem occurred, so the velocity was going down sprint after sprint.
  • pressure of the rest of the organisation for the team to keep up their tempo. This pressure from both sides was crushing morale.
  • The way this team reacted to pressure was to work harder. Most people would have 2 or 3 tasks in progress at the same time. When a developer would finish a task, the testers were too busy testing something else, so they could give the developer direct feedback. When the tester found an issue with a new feature, the developers were already working on something else, so the tester had to wait. Simply put, there was too much focus on working long and hard, not on cooperation and the stuff that actually matters: features.
  • most dysfunctional behaviour comes from the system people are in
  • biggest struggle of this team: pressure & predictability.
  • Most Scrum masters challenge the team to reach the same (or higher) velocity each sprint. This pressure should give a team focus to perform at its best. However, it can also go haywire if the team doesn't deliver. No focus, no pride, no happy customer
  • retrospectives were dismal and planning meetings were a huge burden. The teams' productivity dropped in the days after the sprint, finding new courage to start the next one. Because they had an ineffective work-process, the only outcome of each sprint was to lower the expected velocity, to make sure we would be predictable. Estimation and predictability are only a means to an end and since they were getting in the way of fixing the root cause (and were bringing down the team's spirit) I opted to cut out the planning sessions and sprint deadlines.
  • first change we made was to set a limit of 8 tasks on the 'in progress' column
  • We spent 3 weeks bringing the numbers of open tasks from 21 to 8, without picking up any new work. Of course the team struggled with this new limit. They were used to pick up new work whenever they were blocked somehow, this wasn't allowed any more
Yuval Yeret

Engineering Higher Quality Through Agile Testing Practices The Agile Coach - 1 views

  • Maintaining quality involves a blend of exploratory and automated testing. As new features are developed, exploratory testing ensures that new code meets the quality standard in a broader sense than automated tests alone. This includes ease of use, pleasing visual design, and overall usefulness of the feature in addition to the robust protections against regressions that automated testing provides. 
  • Exploratory testing is a risk-based, critical thinking approach to testing that enables the person testing to use their knowledge of risks, implementation details, and the customers' needs.
  • On our development teams, QA team members pair with developers in exploratory testing, a valuable practice during development for fending off more serious bugs. Much like code review, we’ve seen testing knowledge transfer across the development team because of this. When developers become better testers, better code is delivered the first time.
Yuval Yeret

Why agile transitions initiatives might fail : Jeffrey Palermo (.com) - 1 views

  • The executive makes a “vendor” or external “coach” responsible for the transition If you have handled the first risk and have defined success and success metrics, you likely will not find a vendor who will base his payment on your metrics.  After all, the metrics likely call for less project failure rate, faster response times, etc.  You probably can’t measure these things in less than a year if you really want objective metrics and not one optimized for short-term results at the expense of the longer term.  A vendor might want: # of people trained % of teams using an “agile” project management tool # of teams with an embedded “agile champion” # of successful iterations It is really easy to accomplish the above metrics and still not make any material change in the organization.  I have worked with a client that did something similar to the above.  Most of the teams starting using some new Scrummy project management web application for project tracking.  They declared that monthly status meetings were now iterations.  They declared a member of the team to be the Scrummaster (and sent that person to training).  Overall, the same organizational problems persisted.  Vendors cannot produce real change in an organization unless the organizations executive leadership alters the culture in a meaningful way.
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