To help keep you in a good flow when you are learning or practising the TDD test first approach, it can be useful to use a simple kanban board to manage your flow. Here is a guide to this simple technique.

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To kick off 2011 and to help keep on track with our new years resolutions and goals for the year, the Limited WIP Society are running a personal kanban workshop at SkillsMatter on the 13th January.

Sign up page!!

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Change driven through command and control or positional power has a tendency to fail rapidly.

People can only truly accept and embrace a change when they understand the value of that change. Acceptance of change comes much more eaily if a person understands how that change will benefit them.

Change is hard for an individual, even harder for a team or organisation.

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| XPDay 2010 Wik | XPDay 2010 feedback page |

The 2010 XPDay in London was an amazing experience and my thanks go to the organisers and all the many people that gave great open space sessions and experience reports.

Not since the 2009 Lean & Kanban exchange at SkillsMatter have I been so engergised after an event (and I have been to quite a few great events this year). I feel I have learnt so much in these two days that it will take me all the holidays to digest (and blog about) everything. Here are some of my experiences from the event.

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When it comes to managing change then what ever practices you decide to adopt, its preferable to take an “all in” approach, in that you get as many people involved as you can. This does not mean that you have to adopt everything all at once, but helps you understand the big picture of change within your organisation.

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When trying to share some knowledge or raise issues, I try to lead the audience (audience being an individual, team or community) on a thought trail rather than pointing out issues directly or just imparting the answer. By laying out a path of thinking, the audience is more likely to engage with the concepts or information you are imparting and become involved in path to the answer. Once on the path, the audience is more likely to accept the outcome.

Okay, so how do you start a thought trail, it sounds like a long, drawn out, boring process!

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Limiting your work in progress (WIP) has several benefits when it comes to making individuals and teams more effective. Here are my the most useful approaches I have found.

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For people in software development, a great deal of time is spent working and learning in order to increase the quality of your output and make you a more rounded person. Unfortunately, all this time is spend with your body fairly inactive, leading to another kind of more rounded person that you didn’t plan for, i.e. your body does not get the exercise it wants.

This is a problem for many knowledge worker roles, so here are some things you can do to make you a rounded person in mind and not in body.

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Agile fairytale is a neat way to express agile concepts in a way that is easily understood, using a context more likely to be meaningful or recognisable to a wide audience.

At the heart of Agile Fairytales are three fundamental concepts:

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The term agile evolved to encapsulated the principles behind software development practices such as extreme programming, scrum and other iterative and incremental approaches.

Lean has been around a lot longer, (possibly a great deal longer - Chinese Emperors) but has infrequently seemed to gather momentum in software development until recent years.

On the surface that there is a great deal of commonality between the two approaches. For example with Agile, teams focus on doing enough work to get the job done whilst leaving options open, to help managing the inevitable change with less pain and risk (eg. failing early). This agile practice could be viewed as minimising waste, a lean concept, but do most agile teams have the opportunity to understand that they are minimising waste and the implications of doing so?

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