Who needs a Calendar in a Kanban system?!
Sometime back, we published a blog post Due Dates in Kanban Systems – which drew some flak from some folks who objected to the line of reasoning in that post. However, one of the commentators made a good point – that it made sense to have Due Dates in a Kanban system if in fact the process being visualized on the Kanban board already needed Due Dates. The Kanban Method’s fundamental premise is – start with your current process have and improve gradually, in an evolutionary manner.
February 6, 2014
Application Lifecycle Management is – or should be – the management of an application’s (or applications) lifecycle. An application’s lifecycle really begins from the time it is originally conceived – as a business request to IT to support a specific business function, or as a solution to a strategic opportunity identified during a management review, or a response to a new opportunity for an IT services firm (to bid) for developing a new solution for an external business customer. In response to the request or opportunity, an organization may build a new application from scratch or implement an ISV product (such as an ERP or CRM tool) or even integrate a combination of in-house…
Projects are often executed by dynamic teams. They start with a small core team and as the project gains momentum, add resources over time. This is commonly seen in IT service organizations that do fixed price projects. Fixed price projects have a defined scope that needs to be delivered within a contracted budget and within a negotiated timeline. For the purpose of this experience report, “Dynamic teams” or “Fixed Price projects” will be used interchangeably. Unfortunately, as Ron Jeffries put it, “Agile is founded on management of scope, not predicting when you’ll be done, even if you had fixed team size and “fixed” scope.”
Hello Folks! We thought we’d begin the new year with a few features that will improve the experience for you in terms of usability. You can now move multiple cards with a single click. Just right-click on any lane header to archive or move all cards in that lane. CTRL + click will let you select a set of cards and right-click will let you move only these cards selectively. Continuing with our theme of adding more configurability in SwiftKanban, you can now customize the appearance and order of Card attributes as they appear on the board.
Energetic, responsive, trying harder – those were some of the best compliments we received from our customers. As one of them, who switched from a competing product to us, said, “It looks like you guys are always trying harder and better than the rest of them.” Absolutely! The past 12 months have been truly exciting. 2013 was the year in which organizations ranging from boutique consulting companies to global automotive giants, high-security government agencies to Fortune 500 global brands trusted us and our products with their technology.
There is a lot of attention given to Lean/ Agile product development teams around the work done and the (Lean/ Agile) processes adopted in by the Dev team once a set of features (backlog items) have been identified for a set of sprints (scrums) and/ or Releases. However, how do those features get to the team, nicely bunched up in Releases and Sprints? There is a lot of upstream effort by Product Management that goes in ‘herding the cats’ – defining and maintaining the Product Roadmap with input from myriad and often conflicting sources abstracting features and requirements at the right level, getting stakeholders to agree on their priority…
That was the question posed in a recent discussion. The question further provides the following details – “I work within an agile team. We have a released product and we are still working towards a future release. Every sprint we receive anywhere from 0 to 5 tickets to fix bugs in the released product. Our team is composed of software engineers (to handle new development) and maintenance software engineers ( to handle tickets). My question is how do you account for the maintenance hours during sprint planning. Currently we have a story called maintenance buffer where we allocate some hours to solve tickets.
