The document summarizes changes made at an Agile North conference to improve processes for a development team transitioning from chaos to Kanban. The team split into multiple streams to work on separate projects. They also dedicated more resources to customer support, appointed a product owner for increased collaboration, and restructured code and testing using a service oriented architecture. Retrospectives were also restructured with designated leaders and shared formats to improve upon actions from previous iterations. The outcomes included a focus on customer value, innovation, and visibility into all work being performed.
8. Split the team to multiple streams Separate projects are worked on - where possible Worked on waste and defects to synchronise streams Used a Scrum-style sprint of 2 weeks to swap pairs for development and support RESPONSE: SPLIT THE TEAM
10. Dedicated support desk Away from the development pods Identify issues fast and feed back directly into the team Dramatically improved relationships RESPONSE: IMPROVING SUPPORT
12. Increase customer collaboration and manage expectations High availability as the on site customer Enforce demos prior to deployment Maximise work not done RESPONSE: APPOINT AN OPERATIONS MANAGER
16. Nominated a retrospective leader Minutes taken and emailed Management member included Common retrospective format used Action points placed straight on board RESPONSE: RETROSPECTIVE RESTRUCTURE
18. Focus on customer value - we deliver better quality software, sooner. We’ve found time to innovate and reinvest in improving development Everything needs to be visible, on a card, on a task board
19. We’re not afraid to go back – just because it didn't work before doesn't mean it won’t now. Changes are smaller – tweaks rather than changes of direction Occasionally make changes too soon
Codeweavers background “ From Chaos to Kanban” The period since the first paper Q & A
Formed in February 2002 Providing solutions for the Motor Finance and Insurance sectors Agile adopted in 2007 after Agile North 2007 where we met Dr. Kevin Rutherford Current staff of 24 with 10 Developers C#
Presented at XP2010 in Trondheim, Norway Covers Spring 2007 to Spring 2010 A Journey via Scrum to Kanban
Sharing experience with the community Covers February 2010 to Spring 2011 Key changes via retrospectives Observation – Response format – not in chronological order
Next features board overflowing Per product queue of 2 years work Prioritisation was hard and wasteful Internal and external clarity was poor Not fulfilling the intended purpose
Team of 11 developers working on single piece flow Commit conflicts were wasteful Critical paths caused bottlenecks to other pairs Tried to combat waste during slack time – always doing waste not adding value
knowledge silos had been reduced
Daily swap of 1 or 2 developers handling support Handover caused waste Poor continuity for internal & external clients Interrupted on development when you had been on support
Started using zendesk ticketing system
On site customer not feasible Managing Director becoming too busy Development team making the wrong assumptions
Code changes were too close together Deployments were slowing down feature development Difficult to stick to single piece flow Value lost upstream Brittle tests Missing integration tests Defects deployed to live
An open forum Everyone had to have a good and bad point Became less effective as the SCRUM directives were lost Recurring observations – we weren’t taking action
anything on a card got done – a recurring theme, that if we said we’d do something or had it on an email or other backlog,
