Monday, November 23, 2009
Just a quick heads up to the Agile community in Yorkshire!
There is another one day course on "An Introduction To Agile Software Development" at NTI in Leeds on February 15th 2010. The course is full of practical advice and aimed at teams who are just adopting Agile or who are thinking about adopting Agile.
The course is suitable for developers, testers, managers, business analysts, directors, product owners and anyone else involved in the Agile process.
For more information about this course, visit the NTI web site.
Details
Kanban focuses on becoming successful, which may lead to being Agile. Lean is a set of principles that are being applied to software engineering by a growing number of practitioners. Kanban is a true pull system implementation in software engineering. The five pillars of Lean, which Kanban fully implements are pull, continuous flow, customer value, waste elimination and continuous improvement. The Principles of Kanban are: to agree a team capacity, to limit WIP (Work in Process) to that capacity, to pull value through the value stream, and to make both work and workflow visible. It has proven easy to adopt and lowers resistance to change. The result is a gradual, incremental approach to change that is empowering for everyone.
This meeting will be a special end of year event held at Old Broadcasting House (http://www.ntileeds.co.uk/old-broadcasting-house/).
Speaker
David is an agile development manager and coach with 12 years technical team management and coaching experience, and 20 years software development experience. In recent years, using Scrum and XP, David has coached onshore and offshore development teams and successfully launched an internet video startup from inception to launch. David currently works for BBC Worldwide as a Development Manager, coaching teams on Scrum, Lean and Kanban. David is a certified Scrum Master and Lean practitioner.
Now that my Google Wave beta account has been activated I am starting to explore the possibilities! The first thing that came into my head was that Wave could be a great collaboration tool for exploring requirements / User Stories. You can have an ongoing conversation about the requirements that is documented. You can also have people join and leave the conversation as often as you need. You can upload video, photos etc that show details of a bug or a required feature. It is also ready to run and does not need any customisation work.
I think that Wave would be pretty awful for recording the final spec (maybe Google Docs for that), but for the ongoing exploration of requirements, I think it is good. Obviously, there is not substitute for a face-to-face conversation, but where that is not possible, this could be the answer!
Any thoughts?