Energetic. Responsive. Trying Harder. 2014, Here We Come!
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.
diciembre 31, 2013
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.
Between Dec 16th and 21st, we had the pleasure of hosting David in India to meet a few key customers, Digité/ SwiftKanban employees, as well as host a local meetup in Bangalore (or Bengaluru!). We also took the opportunity to do several things – formally launch SwiftKanban for the India market, start the Limited WIP Society – India chapter and host a dinner with some key industry leaders that allowed them to have a closer interaction with David. It was a great experience for both us and David!
While Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) has become a topic of great discussion for middle-management, especially in Engineering organizations, it has largely remained a discussion on application/ software development and tool-chains. Advantages to Developers and Engineering managers have been highlighted, however, the crucial business benefits that ALM has the promise to deliver to the organizations have yet to be clearly understood and espoused. So that these can become the very basis for effective ALM to be established and for the business benefits to accrue.
Thanksgiving each year is a big occasion for our family and friends – to get together and eat, drink and be merry – and of course, be grateful for what we have! Yet, right before that, during the days leading up to it, there is a sense of angst that builds up as one question occupies the hosts’ – and the rest of the people cooking (we always do it Potluck) – mind – “What shall be the menu for the Big Day??!!” While the thought of getting together and eating, drinking and being merry is everyone’s top priority, it is the what we will be eating and drinking that becomes the biggest factor in whether we will be merry or not!
I was part of a very interesting discussion at a Silicon Valley high-tech giant a couple of weeks back that focused on doing Agile with distributed teams. We discussed several aspects of Scrum/ XP practices in distributed teams – and it turned out one of the main (some said “the only!”) challenges was the ability to run a Daily Standup meeting well! Having been part of conference calls, WebEx meetings and other virtual gatherings for the longest time, this surprised me somewhat. So, in the last week’s Kaizen Camp Seattle Un-conference, I decided to do a session on that exact same topic. 
At Digité/ Swift-Kanban, we had a great visit to the 
