- Daily Stand Up in Lean Coffee Style At the Kanban Leadership Retreat 2013 I overheard Hakan Forss mention that he wanted to talk about a different structure for daily meetings or to have a process description for them (I don't remember exactly what he said and what his intentions were), and I started to think: what if we used the lean coffee style for daily meetings.
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- The Traditional Gemba Walk Has Low Value in Software Engineering I was at the dare13 conference last week where we were talking during a lean coffee session about the Gemba Walk and its value in software engineering. The Gemba Walk is a Lean practice where executives regularly visit the factory floor with a Lean teacher, sensei, or coach, and learn about the [flow][11] by observation, and look for improvement opportunities (reducing waste).
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- Improve Your Way of Working With a Speakers' Corner I have a love-hate relationship with retrospectives. I love them because I can hardly imagine any improvement without them. I hate them because they occur periodically, they are always about problems and rarely about pure improvements (pure means to me that we improve because we just want to be faster, and not because we have a problem that slows us down and we want it to get solved).
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- When Local Optimization Won't Make a Difference A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned at the office during my measure and manage flow in practice talk that we should invest more in optimizing the whole flow and reduce the effort spend on local optimizations. In retrospect, I didn't spend too much time on explaining why, because it had a very loose connection to the subject of the talk, and I assumed that the audience would understand what I meant anyway.
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- We Need Realistic Coding Dojos I'm not sure about your experience with coding dojos, but this is what happens to me every time I attend a series of coding dojos or organize one.
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- Visualize the Flow on the Highest Possible Level I gave an internal workshop about Kanban a couple of days ago, and the colleagues who were there looked enlightened when I mentioned that Kanban should visualize the whole process, because this is the place where it can help the most. Don't get me wrong, it is also fine to have Kanban on the team level, but the real optimization and improvement should happen on the highest possible level.
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- Daily Stand-up is About the Future not the Past In the last couple of weeks, I was thinking a lot about daily stand-up meetings for two particular reasons.
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- Introducing the Expectation Line in Scrum Several weeks ago my colleague Tamás made an interesting point about our planning meetings.
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- Local Leadership Fail Today's post isn't about software development, it is about an epic leadership fail I had the honour to live through. As it happened, I had to go shopping several days ago. There is a nice store nearby, I go there all the time, but this time I got into the middle of an unpleasant situation between the cashier ladies and a customer.
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- When Expand and Collapse Got Beaten Today's post is an instructive story about mixing various good patterns and ideas. They are very useful separately, but when one uses them together, they may lead to problems which nobody wants to deal with at all. We found several different defects in a certain feature, and in order to reduce handover costs I collapsed them together to make an umbrella defect (defect1+defect2+.
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- Our Detective's Blackboard My colleague Attila and I had an interesting discussion several days ago.
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- 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.
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- Code Review During Retrospective Most of the retrospectives I've kept or participated in were about agile approaches (for example communication with the Product Owner) and organisation-related changes, but not everybody is into these. Most software engineers and craftsmen aren't that interested in how to deliver faster, or how to communicate better, they are interested in how to be better at their profession: programming.
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- Third Meetup - Open Space This Wednesday we held the third event of the Budapest Lean and Kanban Meetup Group, which was excellent in my point of view, and we had great discussions. In the beginning we collected the following topics.
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- 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.
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- Reducing Waste in Testing - The Problem Testing is the most important part of any kind of software development methodology, but it is also the most neglected one. Nowadays, when an organisation does testing, it produces such a high amount of waste that the whole development process becomes very expensive, which makes it harder to win projects over the competition and risks the existing relationship with the customer.
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- How to Narrow Down What to Test An old friend told me that they did not do automatic testing at her company, or any kind of testing for that matter, because in terms of money they are better off if they do ad hoc testing and bug fixing one week prior to the delivery date. Then I got into an interesting discussion where the topic was that the customer does not pay for tests, she pays for a working software.
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- 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.
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- Weekly - CW16 It was a quite calm week, had several very good discussions and ideas, but before going further, here is the collection for calendar week 16, 2011.
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- 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.
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- Weekly - CW14 Without further ado, here is the collection for calendar week 14, 2011.
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- Weekly - CW13 It's been a quite busy week, but here come the links for calendar week 13, 2011.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Visualize Workflow With DoD Line One of the key principles of Kanban is to visualize the workflow. A common practice for that is to have a Kanban board where the proper phases are visualized. In most of the cases, there is a criterion for moving an item from one phase to another, but this criterion is not written down, or in a better case it is written down, but in a word document or in a wiki article.
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- Daily Stand-up Variations During the last few years I did different kinds of stand-up meetings in Scrum and in Kanban teams. In this post, I'm going summarize the pros and cons I found in them. The most common stand-up meeting style is the daily scrum. In this meeting, the ball or a stick goes around round-robin style.
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- 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.
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- Measuring TDD I was cleaning up my old files and came across an old whiteboard shot, which reminded me an old small technique on measuring the amount of done Test Driven Development (TDD) work. In case of a less advance agile team, a usual discussion topic during a retrospective is TDD.
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- About Job Interviews I'm reading a lot about how to turn organizations to agile, but there is one thing which is rarely considered.
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- In Pursuit of the Cross-Functional Team During agile transition, it is common that large organizations take the books and advices word by word. In scrum, it is advised to have cross-functional teams. This advice is unfortunately sometimes interpreted in the wrong way. For some people, cross-functional team means that everyone on the team shares the same technical and business knowledge about the tasks that the team is supposed to work on.
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- Agile Corner I'm working in a quite large organization (several teams with different goals and purposes), and realized that it is very hard to distribute ideas among colleagues, and it is even harder to follow their agile development. I participated in the open space sessions at xp2010, and got an idea.
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- The Agile Trophy There are certain ways to appreciate efforts and achievements; the most common one is a salary bonus. As Daniel H. Pink pointed out in his book Drive that kind of reward can kill the intellectual motivation and productivity. Nevertheless, I'm not in the position to give money to colleagues, but I still want to remunerate the agile efforts in some way.
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- Using Kata for Improvements I used to keep coding dojos for my colleagues, and it was sometimes very hard to find the right topic. I recently rediscovered the code kata - I did it earlier, but stopped after a short period -, and got an idea. I'm going to use it for discovering areas where our teams can improve.
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