Kanban and the Focus on Fundamentals
Our Kanban journey began early in 2010 when we decided that we would build a product in the Kanban space that would address some of the basic issues we saw our prospects face in adoption of Agile methods such as Scrum and XP within their organizations that were historically used to doing waterfall or iterative or some hybrid Agile method that combined more than one type of processes. While the presence of established competitors was a strong reason to look beyond the ‘popular’ Agile methods, we also felt a strong appeal for Kanban existed because of its focus on 3 key fundamentals.
October 20, 2011
It has been an exciting 3 weeks since we launched the GA release of SwiftKanban. Clearly, Kanban for software development and IT teams is being seen as the elusive weapon that promises to take Agile to the enterprise. From the volume of queries and the common themes of the inquiries, it is clear Agile practitioners know what they are looking for and will be demanding the right solution to help them make the transition to being an Agile enterprise.
In the last 2 years, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a delivery model for corporate applications has found a significant amount of support. In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash worldwide, there has been a surge of interest in exploring the SaaS model for a variety of reasons – mainly around reducing up-front investment typically associated with on-premise license purchases (operating expenses vs. capital expenses), ease of getting up and running, the ability to opt-out if you didn’t like the software, and several others.
To my mind the phrase Application Lifecycle Management naturally means managing the lifecycle of an application. An application’s life begins humbly – with a request from a user or a customer, which fights for its survival amongst scores of similar requests. Once it wins, an application – however small or large – gets implemented/ developed to meet that request. Once deployed, an application has a life, the length of which is determined by a number of factors such as TCO and conformance to changing business requirements. The moment these factors weigh against the application, out it goes…
Digite recently sponsored a team at the Agile Coach Camp (Goa, India) organized by ASCI (Agile Software community of India) where a good number of agile coaches and practitioners from various leading organizations and cities of India met in an open space format, to discuss various Agile coaching and implementation issues, as well as share notes on various flavors and practices of Agile being implemented in different organizations.