Archive for category scrumban
Impediment Colored Glasses
Posted by David Bland in agile, lean, scrum, scrumban on November 19, 2011
impediment – a hindrance or obstruction in doing something: “an impediment to progress”.
When you are an acting ScrumMaster or Agile Project Manager, it is common to seek out impediments so that you can help to remove them. Before you know it, impediments seem to be all around you ranging from the individual, team and organizational levels. A person can quickly feel consumed and overwhelmed by this new found responsibility.
A few years ago I was having a conversation with a colleague about all of the impediments I’d uncovered and how I needed to remove them as soon as possible. About half way through the conversation he interjected “These are not impediments, these are merely the tasks we need to complete our user stories”.
Then it dawned on me, I was so focused on removing impediments that I had begun to view our tasks as blockers to progress.
I was wearing impediment colored glasses…. [Read More]
Dipping Your Toes Into Kanban
Posted by David Bland in agile, extreme programming, kanban, scrum, scrumban on January 26, 2011
The following post was originally a guest article for Planbox and is the basis for my proposed Agile2011 Lightning Talk
Like me, you may have read about the growing popularity of kanban in the agile software development community. Perhaps its mysterious allure and intriguing pronunciation (kahn-bahn not kayun-bayun) have piqued your curiosity, yet you struggle with finding a pragmatic way to apply it to your current software development process?
Interestingly enough, the beauty of kanban is that you can apply it to your two week iterations… right now if you like without that much disruption. In fact, you may even find it so useful that you’ll find other ways to work the kanban mojo.
Let me explain… [Read More]
We’re Self Organizing Into… Kanban?
What’s Kanban?
It isn’t a question you’d expect to hear from a team adopting work in progress limits and just in time tasking while only committing to small user stories.
One of my favorite aspects of being a ScrumMaster and Agile Coach is witnessing a team evolve by inspecting and adapting over time. Granted it isn’t a ride for the faint of heart, but it can be an extremely fascinating experience. This is especially true when the team feels empowered enough to mold themselves into a highly functioning unit.
From my experience, this becomes most apparent during iteration retrospectives… [Read More]
