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Time-Boxing:
- Agile approach promotes breaking up tasks into small chunks that can be developed incrementally and using a full length interval called a time-box for a sprint for development of software features
- When a team begins a project using Scrum, one of the important question that arises is what should be the sprint length?
- As per Scrum recommendations, length should be in between one and four weeks.
- The scheduling approach with time-boxing becomes focused on "how many of these small, incremental features can be completed in a short fixed length sprint?"
- Rather than, "how long does the development interval need to be to accomodate those features?"
- For this to work the individual features need to be small enough to fit inside of a fixed-length sprint
Basically, time boxing is constraint used by teams to help focus on the value.
- Working in time boxes is equal to creating short milestones and achieving those milestones in a continuous manner
- It also helps prevent a common problem in software dev called "Feature creep", where the teams incrementally add features to the software without scrutinising relevance or need.
- Time boxed projects teams work to minimise the effort and resources needed to achieve the expected value. This is called minimum viable product .
Where is Kanban used?
- It is used for demand-driven processes that are very reactive and difficult or impractical to plan
Eg: A call centre queue handling customer calls
- Kanban is used for software application development processes that need to be highly adaptable and maybe be difficult to plan in advance
- Having more than one person have the same skills avoids bottlenecks in the workflow
- So teams hire basic best practices like code review and mentoring help to spread knowledge. Shared skills means members can take on heterogeneous work, which further optimises the cycle time
- It also means that if there is a backup of work, the entire team can swarm on it to get the process flowing smoothly again.
Kanban boards:
- Kanban believes in visual transparency for this reason Kanban boards are used
- Its a work and workflow visualisation tool that enables you to optimise the flow of your work
- Physical Kanban boards are typically use sticky notes on a whiteboard to communicate status, progress, and issues
Lean:
Five principles of Lean:
1. Understand and maximise value
- Specify the value as the customer sees it
2. Optimise the value stream
- Eliminate waste
3. Pull production
- Make the value flow at the customer's pull
4. Single piece flow
- Involve and empower employees
5. Continuous imporvement
- Keep changing
2. Optimise the value stream:
- Identify value stream - All the actions required to create the product, the process
- Further identify
* Redundant steps
* Steps that burden resources
* Steps that impact risk, relationships and quality
- Fine-tune the process
- A popular tool is to implement this step - Stream mapping
4. Single piece flow
- The ability of a single order or piece of work to flow smothly across the whole system without interruptions and at the maximum possible speed
- In other words, the more things you think you are doing at the same time, the less productive you become
- Avoid committing teams to unrealistic schedules and budgets
How does agile fit in?
- Moving quickly and lightly
* sleek, nimble, adaptive, responsive
- iterate to deliver meaningful results
- Allow requirements to evolve
- Communicate - real time, quick, informal (face to face)
- Give porject particioants autonomy
- Cultivate open-mindedness
-Avoid "cure all" "either or" thinking
Implmenetation of lean:
- Project planning phase
- Perform visual workflow management
* Sprint plans
* Visual workflow board
* Stand up meetings
* Risk mitigation
*Quality control
- Project delivery
Stand up meeting - how to?
- Should be held before either starting time or before lunch hour
- Should last no maore than 1-1.5 minutes times the number of attendees (15 mins max during at first)
- Team members with active tasks should attend
- Off-site people can "virtual" proces
- Overseas people can be connected through designated "liaison"
Summary:
- Lean is a mindset not a framwork
- Quality control is a bog part of it
