Posted on July 29th, 2009 in Silver Catalyst by siddharta || 2 Comments
Silver Catalyst now takes weekends into account when drawing the ideal burndown line. The old ideal line was slightly misleading because it assumed that you will burn down the exact same amount every day. In reality teams don’t work on the weekends, and so they need to burn down extra on the weekdays.
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Posted on July 28th, 2009 in Agile, Kanban by siddharta || 13 Comments
Teams that do Scrum for a long period of time naturally tend to hit into some walls. In the process of inspecting and adapting over a period of time, they eventually end up with something like a Kanban process. In this post, I’ll explain how the evolution worked for us.
Velocity based sprint planning
To start with, we did plain vanilla Scrum. Two week sprints, sprint planning meetings, releases and so on. However, we soon ran into an issue with velocity based capacity planning.
Velocity is a probabilistic distribution, so if your average velocity is 20 points, then that doesn’t mean you will do exactly 20 points every sprint. Some sprints may be less, some more, but on average it is 20 points.
The first problem is that in Scrum, the team commits to the sprint plan. So if the average velocity is 20 points, typically you will commit to 20 points of work. Problem is, you will rarely do exactly 20 points. Most of the time you are less or more. This is quite natural, because velocity is probabilistic. If we were to use the terminology from Demming, you would say it is common cause variation.
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Posted on July 22nd, 2009 in Agile, Silver Catalyst by siddharta || No Comment
The cumulative flow graph shows the trend of the count of work in each stage of the value stream. We’ve added this report to Silver Catalyst.
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Posted on July 21st, 2009 in Agile, Silver Catalyst by siddharta || No Comment
If you’re a consulting shop, you may have developers working on multiple projects at the same time. In such situations it can get difficult to gauge the developer load across projects. That’s where the new User Capacity Limits feature of Silver Catalyst comes into play. Here is how it works
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Posted on July 15th, 2009 in Silver Catalyst by siddharta || No Comment
This video shows some applications of the notification system in Silver Catalyst. In particular,
- How to get Silver Catalyst notifications delivered to your email client
- How to filter notifications so that you view only the events you want – for example to only track blockers
During the course of the video you’ll also see how to override the WIP limit temporarily to expedite a critical item.
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