Put a Spike In It

Spikes in Agile Software Development environments are used to investigate a concept and/or create a simple prototype. Basically, a spike is a quick (typically less than a sprint of effort) exploration by coding of an area in which the development team lacks confidence. The spike is concluded when you learn what you needed to learn....

Eclipse Mylyn 3.6 lights up Indigo, puts an end to faceless builds

Yesterday’s Eclipse Indigo release delivered a year’s worth of improvements on what has become the de facto IDE platform for Java and beyond. The Java package has seen major additions, including the WindowBuilder tool that originated from Instantiations and the m2e plug-in that eases Maven-based builds. EGit 1.0 is an essential tool for the growing...

About WIP Limits and Card Size

One of the new features just released in Planview AgilePlace Kanban is the ability to specify WIP Limits by Card “Size”, instead of the number of Cards in a lane. Earlier this week, after announcing this feature, I got a couple of “Really?” emails like this one, from Arne Roock: Chris, just saw your new features. Most of them...

Introducing Board Cloning! And more!

We are excited to announce a new set of features for our Team Edition based on ideas coming from our best source – you – our customers. We think you’ll agree that these features help move Kanban from the team level to the enterprise, while still retaining our trademark ease-of-use. And just wait ’til you see some...

Make Process Policies Explicit

In his book, Kanban – Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business, David Anderson identified five core properties that have been observed to be present in each successful implementation of the Kanban Method. Visualize the Workflow Limit WIP (work in process) Manage Flow Make Process Policies Explicit Improve Collaboratively (using Models and the Scientific Method) The fourth...

Mylyn visiting Skills Matter

Ever wondered what is going on inside the brain of people working at Tasktop? Last week, I had to honor to speak at Skills Matter, Europe’s largest provider of open-source and agile trainings in the London area. It was a great time in London and Skills Matter was kind enough to provide a recorded version...

A Look Down the (Pipe)Line

As PIPELINE 2011 — a free, Web-based product innovation conference — draws near, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting more than a few of its presenters. Last year, we at Planview started this PIPELINE thing with the initial PIPELINE 2010 conference. We felt there was a great opportunity to leverage a virtual technology platform to...

Using Strategic Capacity Planning to Manage R&D Portfolio Resource Bottlenecks – Enrich Consulting

Rocks in the river When selecting projects for the portfolio, practitioners of Strategic Capacity Planning often exclusively consider financial constraints. Though the terminology varies across industries–outside costs, out-of-pocket expenditures, external expenditure–the concept is the same: money spent on something other than staff. If internal resources are considered at all, it is usually at a very...

Proposal to move Hudson to Eclipse

Some of the most successful open source projects have histories that transcend organizational boundaries. My first experience with this was AspectJ, which we launched as an independent open source portal out of Xerox PARC in 2000. In 2003 our DARPA funding dried up, but the user community was still growing. We moved the project to...

Top 5 Trends for Product Development Companies

Not a day goes by in which I am not asked: Carrie, what do you see as the coming trends for product development companies? (Well, maybe a day or two passes without the question — but with my travel schedule, I can be awfully hard track down.) Given that, I thought I’d share with you...