Posted on January 25th, 2010 in Agile, Kanban, Lean, Silver Catalyst, silverstripesoftware by siddharta || 3 Comments
This is the presentation I gave at Agile Bengaluru 2010 this past weekend. It describes the journey moving from ad-hoc development to an agile process and how we then adapted it to a more Kanban like process. The bad news is that you can’t really make out much with just the slides as the commentary is not there. The good news is that the session was recorded, so I’ll post it up once the recording is made available. In the meantime, here is the presentation.
Posted on December 31st, 2009 in Agile, Kanban, Lean by siddharta || No Comment
A few days ago, the hard disk on my laptop crashed. I called up tech support and asked them to replace it. A technician came down and changed the hard disk and then proceeded to reinstall the operating system using the recovery disk provided by the manufacturer. Unfortunately the disk was scratched so the reinstall could not complete. Now instead of replacing the disk, the technician asked me to contact tech support and someone else will come down and provide a new disk. Knowing that the OS would have to be reinstalled, and something might happen, why didn’t he have a backup disk with him? So I have to make another call to tech support.
Executives see the rising number of calls and try to cut corners to manage it quicker, leading to.. even more calls. A broken process itself contributing to increasing the demand.
Thats failure demand.
So what does this have to do with agile teams?
Continue reading ‘Why agile teams need to understand failure demand’ »
Posted on October 8th, 2009 in Agile, Kanban by siddharta || No Comment
The cumulative flow chart is a power packed graph that can show you a number of important metrics in a single graph.
Here is how to figure out everything that the graph is telling you
Continue reading ‘Interpreting the Cumulative Flow Diagram’ »
Posted on August 4th, 2009 in Agile, Kanban by siddharta || 2 Comments
One of the problem of Scrum is that it leads you to believe that there is no workflow at all. Stories are started, they go “in progress” and then they are done. Unfortunately this leads to a myopic development oriented view of the project.
Continue reading ‘Make Your Process Workflow Explicit’ »
Posted on July 28th, 2009 in Agile, Kanban by siddharta || 12 Comments
Teams that do Scrum for a long period of time naturally tend to hit into some walls. In the process of inspecting and adapting over a period of time, they eventually end up with something like a Kanban process. In this post, I’ll explain how the evolution worked for us.
Velocity based sprint planning
To start with, we did plain vanilla Scrum. Two week sprints, sprint planning meetings, releases and so on. However, we soon ran into an issue with velocity based capacity planning.
Velocity is a probabilistic distribution, so if your average velocity is 20 points, then that doesn’t mean you will do exactly 20 points every sprint. Some sprints may be less, some more, but on average it is 20 points.
The first problem is that in Scrum, the team commits to the sprint plan. So if the average velocity is 20 points, typically you will commit to 20 points of work. Problem is, you will rarely do exactly 20 points. Most of the time you are less or more. This is quite natural, because velocity is probabilistic. If we were to use the terminology from Demming, you would say it is common cause variation.
Continue reading ‘From Scrum to Kanban’ »
