InfoQ Homepage Agile Techniques Content on InfoQ

Articles

RSS Feed

Newer Older

Kanban at Scale – A Siemens Success Story

This article shows an internally driven and remarkably smooth Kanban implementation approach which very quickly rewarded Siemens Health Services (HS) with real and sustainable improvements in predictability, efficiency and quality. It demonstrates the benefits of “flow” and its advantages in terms of actionable metrics and forecasting capabilities based on real data captured from recent releases.

Bennet Vallet
on Feb 28, 2014
The Kanban Survivability Agenda

This third and last article in the series on the Kanban “nine values, three agendas” model explores the survivability agenda. The values associated with this agenda are understanding, agreement, and respect; these say much about the philosophy that underlies Kanban, the humane, start with what you do now approach to change.

Mike Burrows
on Feb 20, 2014
Solving the Gordian Knot of Chronic Overcommittment in Development Organizations

Why do we promise more than we can deliver? Why do we say yes when we are already too busy? Chronic Overcommitment is a pervasive problem in the IT industry. In this article we take a look at the behaviors that drive over commitment and the dynamics at play in your organization the make it a difficult problem to solve. Finally, we offer some advice to those who suffer from this affliction.

Rolf Häsänen Morgan Ahlström
on Feb 13, 2014
3 years of Kanban at Sandvik IT: The Story of an Improvement Journey

This is the story of an enterprise-wide Kanban implementation. It explains why Sandvik IT chose the Kanban method; how it was deployed using a kick-start concept; how it was followed-up using a depth-of-kanban assessment; and the effects so far. The article includes links to concrete and step-by-step information on how to run these kick-starts and assessments

Christophe Achouiantz
on Feb 10, 2014
Kanban’s service orientation agenda

This second article in the series on the Kanban “nine values, three agendas” model explores the service orientation agenda. Building on the sustainability agenda, this agenda adds the values of customer focus, flow, and leadership. Individually, each of these brings some challenge; collectively, they can represent to a significant sense of direction, a much more outward-looking approach to change.

Mike Burrows
on Jan 29, 2014
The Sustainability Agenda in Kanban

This first article in the series on the Kanban “nine values, three agendas” model, explores the sustainability agenda: a common approach to Kanban adoption at the level of individuals and teams, often motivated by the need for relief from unsustainable practices and workloads. This sustainability agenda draws on the Kanban values transparency, balance, and collaboration.

Mike Burrows
on Jan 06, 2014
Tracking Schedule Progress in Agile

The challenge of knowing whether we are on track to deliver haunts projectmanagers and developmentmanagers at various levels as their organizations take on agile approaches to product and project development. Driving towards smaller work items and lower work in process brings the benefits of both better project risk management as well as more effective agile execution and learning.

Yuval Yeret
on Jan 01, 2014
I’d Rather Be Coding – Writing Things Down

For lots of reasons, most developers hate writing down anything that isn’t code. The Agile Manifesto deemphasizes documentation, but there are times on a project when a little documentation can go a long way. In this article, we will explore why collaboration over comprehensive documentation shouldn’t mean “NO” documentation – and when you should stop coding and start writing things down.

Nate McKie
on Dec 31, 2013
Monty Taylor and Jim Blair on CI and Test Automation at OpenStack

Monty Taylor and James Blair talk about the build and test challenges they face at OpenStack, and how they managed to tackle them. Managing hundreds of VMs on public clouds, integrating up to 400 commits a day and running thousands of test jobs on them are some of the challenges described.

Sai Yang
on Dec 29, 2013
DevOps @ large investment bank

This article is part of the “DevOps War Stories” series. In each issue we hear what DevOps brings to a different organisation, we learn what worked and what didn’t, and chart the challenges faced during adoption. This time a very personal story on introducing a DevOps mindset at a large bank. In particular how the automation of configuration and release management processes enabled collaboration.

Niek Bartholomeus
on Dec 11, 2013
Applying Lean Thinking to Software Development

Lean’s major concept is about reducing waste, meaning anything in your production cycle that is not adding value to the customer is considered waste and should therefore be removed from the process. Steven Peeters explains how you can apply Lean principles in an IT environment.

Steven Peeters
on Dec 05, 2013
Deploying it right with AppVeyor CI and PowerShell

Deploying real applications is hard. Questions arise when there are configuration settings in the Registry, custom folders structure, or you have to deploy to a web cluster. In this article we look at setting up continuous delivery for a solution consisting of ASP.NET web application and Windows service to a staging and production environments using PowerShell remoting and AppVeyor CI.

Feodor Fitsner
on Oct 30, 2013