- Visit at Cluj Napoca My old friend Victor invited me to Cluj Napoca, Romania to talk about software development in practice. There were three talks in the morning at his company evoline and a fourth talk late afternoon at the local meetup group. We started the day with an introduction to Kanban, because the audience knew about Agile, but Kanban was something new, and additionally we needed it for the maintenance-related presentation: Kanban Basics for Beginners Revised from Zsolt Fabok After a short break we continued with a longer talk about maintenance and how to use Agile, Lean, Kanban and leadership techniques in order to stabilise a maintenance situation: Kanban Basics for Beginners Revised from Zsolt Fabok The last presentation was about how to use Agile techniques without saying Agile: Agile in Stealth Mode from Zsolt Fabok My talk at the meetup became a bit longer than I expected, but we had - at least I felt like that - a great discussion how the software development process evolved at Digital Natives - my current company - and, uniquely, we talked about what we were doing right and where we failed: Evolution of the Software Development Process at Digital Natives from Zsolt Fabok I promised a list of books worth reading.
more...
- Customer Diversity Last year at xp2010 Scott E. Page talked about the benefits of diversity inside an organisation. According to Scott, diversity improves the performance and decision making process of an organisation. Today late afternoon I attended a startup meetup event where Patrick Vlaskovits talked a bit about the diversity among customers.
more...
- Physical and Electronic Boards Several weeks ago, I went to a team leader event with @csapoz and Krisz, where - besides other interesting topics - we talked about the usage of physical and electronic Kanban and Scrum boards. At that time I thought that electronic boards were evil - kill communication and collaboration -, but I decided to give a try to their suggestion: use the physical board for tracking and collaboration, and use the electronic board for administration.
more...
- Kanban on Organisational Level A couple of days ago, I talked to the head of an organisation, who was having a hard time to get an overview of the current work of her organisation, and struggling to have enough manpower in order to deliver products in time. This is a common problem, I had talked to other leaders who had the same issue, and in fact I was in a similar situation before myself.
more...
- Weekly - CW15 While I spent most of my time with learning more about Ruby on Rails and RSpec this week, I found the following links worth sharing. So here is my collection for calendar week 15, 2011.
more...
- The Calm Period We are about six weeks after pimping my team - let's see what has happened since then. A massive change is usually followed by a calm period. During such a period the team adapts to the effects of the change (new environment and methodology) and only small additional changes are applied, something like fine tuning.
more...
- Agile Seating Layout A couple of weeks ago my team started to do things differently than before, and I promised I'd write about the effects of certain changes and new improvements. Effective and fluent communication is essential for an agile workspace, but unfortunately our former seating layout didn't support either of that, so we changed it, inspired by an idea from Martin Fowler.
more...
- Pimp my Team ## AbstractFrom the middle of January 2011, our organization has been working in a new structure. There were different outcomes of this change, one of them was that my former firefighting team has been dismissed, and so has the team introduced in my Kanban Nightmares article.
more...
- XP with Kanban instead of Scrum ## AbstractI'm going to step into a minefield, because in this post, I'm going to share my subjective experiences with Scrum, and I'm going to share the reasons why moved from Scrum to XP + Kanban. I'm using the minefield metaphor, because every single sentence I'm going to share can be exploded with good explanations, mostly from advanced scrum practitioners.
more...
- Kanban Nightmares I've mentioned in my previous post that I have less time for coding nowadays. I've started to lead a new team with the intention to introduce Kanban in their way of working. In this post, I'm going to share the result of this introduction. In these last few years I've had opportunities to observe coaches and consultants how they help teams and organizations.
more...
- Handling Additional Resources Firefighting happens usually during bug fixing and at the end of projects, when the project may or may not be as successful as people want it to be. In this particular post, I'm going to talk about the latter case. Usually, when the project is in trouble, management offers more (human) resources in order to finish the project in time and deliver the committed scope.
more...