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  • Kanban exposes documentation bottlenecks

    Sarah 4:39 pm on 28th April, 2010 | 4 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: development process, documentation, kanban, SkillsMatter

    Back in November I blogged about our company trialing Kanban, “Let’s all jump on the Kanban” which we have now extended to our Documentation Team – something described by David Joyce as BBC Kanban Flu.

    We kind of knew what was really delaying the release of documentation but it’s not until you make it transparent and have real measurements that it becomes something that cannot be ignored any more. As my old boss Mark Suster used to say “we manage what we measure”. This is where I think Kanban System’s greatest strength lies.

    With Kanban we realised that while some of our documents are quickly produced, we have 7 documents in progress being “worked on” by 2 technical authors. I say “worked on” because all 7 are in some way being blocked by a developer who needs to provide input of some type. The average number of working days a document has been waiting for a developer is 14 days.

    The documents in progress are waste – they offer no value to the business until we have released them to our clients, and this is costing us thousands!

    There are three main reasons why this is happening:

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  • Agile Software Development – One Size Doesn’t Fit All

    Ian Alderson 12:01 am on 2nd April, 2010 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , kanban, ,

    As I mentioned in part I of this series, Adoption of Agile at Caplin, when we first started following an agile methodology (in our case Scrum) in February 2005 we were desperate to implement it successfully and wanted to adhere to all of the best practices.

    We persevered with this approach for several months, repeatedly referring to the books on Scrum we had purchased and the numerous websites on the subject which were cropping up at the time, to find out ways of improving the process.

    With hindsight this looks a little conservative, however back then we were still getting to grips with agile and didn’t want to make any significant adjustments that hadn’t been tried and proven elsewhere.

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  • An Estimate is not a Guarantee

    Ian Alderson 12:57 pm on 26th February, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , kanban, ,

    The statement that an estimate is not a guarantee might sound obvious but it often feels anything but. Over the years I have frequently heard managers complain that something has taken longer than was anticipated and have been told to improve the estimates.

    Of course at times the estimates have been inaccurate, with features taking far more time to implement than was initially predicted. The question is how to learn from these experiences to help improve your estimates. This is especially pertinent for software engineers within financial services because this same conundrum is at the heart of pricing financial instruments.

    This article looks at how the Rational Expectations Theory can help you improve your estimates in software development. It starts by looking at estimating something much easier than a software enhancement, your journey time into work, and demonstrates when that estimate should be considered good or bad. It then looks how this can be applied to software development.

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  • Designing a kanban board - not as simple as you might think

    Adam Shone 2:33 pm on 16th February, 2010 | 7 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , kanban

    Last month Emin Tatosian posted an article about agile team-board layouts in which he showcases one of our more successful board designs. It’s fair to say that we don’t always get it right first time, so I thought I’d share an example of a layout that seemed to be a good idea at first but turned out to be badly flawed.

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  • Agile Framework Development

    Ian Alderson 12:58 pm on 2nd February, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , kanban, , ,

    At times it seems that the philosophy of agile software development is at odds with that of framework development. Given the amount of print and web space dedicated to agile methodologies, it’s incredible how little is dedicated to this topic. It’s almost as if this conflict needs to be kept hidden away from view, not to be discussed in public.

    At Caplin we are living proof that framework development can be achieved following agile principles. We have been successfully building frameworks and APIs for the past 5 years using various agile methodologies from Scrum, to a mix of Scrum and XP, to Kanban.

    This article represents the approaches that we have undertaken to successfully build our frameworks.

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  • Let's all jump on the Kanban

    Sarah 3:36 pm on 20th November, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , kanban, , ,

    We have been using agile methods – a typical mix of Scrum and XP – for some years now at Caplin. Though all of us have had some level of formal training and many years of experience in agile techniques, I have observed a couple of drawbacks with the Scrum process and the use of it within our organisation:

    1. It’s very difficult to use velocity for Scrum sign-up because team personnel change frequently
    2. Unexpected work can impact the project teams resulting in a demotivated team because they sometimes do not complete what they have signed-up for

    There must be a better way?

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