Tea-Driven Development

Karl Scotland has posted a great description of how his team solved some issues they were having within their Scrum team by moving over to using a lean-thinking or Kanban system, based on a short buffer or Queue of Minimum Marketable Features (MMFs). It’s probably the clearest explanation I’ve seen yet of why and how to employ this emerging technique, and Karl certainly makes a compelling case for considering this as a progression for teams who are experienced with Scrum and need to be able to adapt rapidly during the development of a story or feature.

One of my key questions about Kanban is how it’s possible to predict long-term delivery dates for specific features, and although Karl goes some way to answering those questions, it looks as though you need, as well as a mature agile team, a fairly mature and trusting organisation to make this work.

I guess you also need to be working on a product that’s already in production and being updated regularly.

Brian Marrrick makes a good point that ‘incremental’ and ‘iterative’ just look and sound way too similar to make the decent brand-names for ‘evil’ and ‘good’ software development practice respectively.

Note to self: say ‘incremental assembly’ (boo!) and ‘iterative growth’ (yeah!).

The more I think about it, the more I like the growth vs assembly metaphor for software: creating a fertile environment etc… nice.

Last night in the pub I was introduced to the term ‘corncob’, a label apparently used in some software development circles for a disruptive team member. I’d love to know how on earth that particular word was chosen.

I rather dislike this tendency to put people into boxes, as the next obvious step is to write the person off, but I guess giving these stereotypes a name at least gives you a framework for discussing them and starting to figure out what is driving their dysfunctional behaviour.

Plus we can all recognise a little bit of them in ourselves, and our fellow team-mates. Anyone else lucky enough to have a bit of an EXTRA TERRESTRIAL on their team? (Hi Brett!)