Day 22 – Food Friday

We are two months away from our production release and, like always, I try to find a way to motivate the team to reach the finish line. So I have turned Friday’s into Food Friday. Three people each week will bring in food and share it with the rest of the team. Last Friday was [...]

Product Owner Kanban Board

This week we received our upstream whiteboard, also referred to as our Product Owner Kanban board. Here is a list of reasons why we decided to go with Product Owner Kanban board: Needed to provide development with a view of what was coming Needed to ensure that the Product Owner was completing certain activities before [...]

Kanban Board – Day 11 – 15

This last week had its highlights and challenges. I’d thought I’d go ahead and share what those moments were. Here were the highlights: Documented what we thought our WIP’s were for each column. This is really tuff because more than half of our team is offsite. But I will figure out a way to fix [...]

Waterfall into Scrum

Here is a presentation I made to management today about how scrum correlates into our current waterfall process. Overall, I thought the presentation went great, especially when they gave us approval to move forward. BIG WIN! http://www.slideshare.net/choldorf/scrum-waterfall-into-scrum

Paper Airplane Game

Today we did an exercise to see the benefits of setting Work In Progress Limits (WIP). The exercise is called The Airplane Factory Game. http://www.agileway.com.br/2009/11/16/the-airplane-factory-game/ Here were our takeaways: 1)      If a new request is added, it is easier to complete it if we have balance and WIP limits. 2)      Having everyone work as fast [...]

Kanban Board – Making Work Visible – Day 7

I continue to change things to make it feel better for the team and myself. This week I have added a few things to help: 1)      Bug avatars – I added bugs to cards that have open defects. So now you can look a card and visually see how many open defects there are. 2)      [...]