Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Announcing Lean Kanban 2009 Conference - May 6-8

Due to demand from members of the kanbandev group I have created a Lean Kanban conference to bring together the community to discuss and extend the state-of-the-art in using Lean and Kanban in software development and full project lifecycle management.

Registration is now open http://www.leankanbanconference.com/
Download Draft Agenda and Promotional Flyer (PDFs)

The event is limited to 125 folks. We expect it to sell out. We’ve selected a superb venue the Mandarin Oriental Miami located on South Beach at Brickell Quay right on the water.

http://www.mandarinoriental.com/miami/

Because of committed sponsors like Net Objectives and Ultimate Software, VersionOne we are able to keep the registration fee down to only $800 per person for the full 2.5 day event. Registration includes an invite to our evening reception on May 6th courtesy of Ultimate Software. Breakfast and coffee breaks are included all 3 days. Lunch is included on Wednesday and Thursday 7th and 8th.

Wednesday 6th May - Keynote Alan Shalloway - Lean Track and Kanban Track sessions
Thursday 7th May - Keynote Dean Leffingwell - followed by Open Space all day
Friday 8th May - Keynote David J. Anderson - followed Lightning talks for 2 hours

Please register now to avoid disappointment and book your flights to Miami. Please be sure to make a reservation with the hotel. Ask for the “David J. Anderson & Associates” event rate of $250 per night. The hotel has indicated that it will honor this rate for extended bookings prior or post the event subject to availability.

Our confirmed speakers are:

David J. Anderson
Alan Shalloway
Dean Leffingwell
Peter Middleton
James Sutton
Clinton Keith
Amit Rathore
Corey Ladas
Karl Scotland
Eric Landes
Eric Willeke
Reni Elisabeth Phil Friis
Alisson Vale
David Laribee
Linda Cook and Max Keeler
Sterling Mortensen

Many of these people are regular contributors to the kanbandev group and havetogether created and lead the kanban movement over the last 18 months.I believe this is the finest list of proponents of Lean software development ever assembled.

With our 2.5 day format, we have one day of sessions in two tracks, one day of open space and half a day of lightning talks. This will give all attendees the chance to work with the experts directly. I look forward to welcoming you to Miami in May.

[This article was updated January 9th communicating that we rescheduled the event from the original dates of Feb 18th-20th.]Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, kanban, Alan+Shalloway, Dean+Leffingwell

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Scott Ambler reviews CMMI+Agile Technical Note

Nice balanced piece from Scott Ambler in Dr. Dobb’s Journal revewing the new Technical Note from the SEI which I co-authored. One slight correction to Scott’s piece, I actually wasn’t an author of the Agile Manifesto (Jon Kern represented the FDD community at that meetings) rather I was an author of the Declaration of Interdependence that founded the APLN. Not sure that I want to be known as one of the AC5 though  Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, CMMI, Hillel+Glazer, Scott+Ambler, Mike+Konrad, Jeff+Dalton, Sandra+Shrum, Software+Engineering, SEI, Carnegie+Mellon, Dr+Dobb’s

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Agile 2009 - FDD anyone?...

Eric Willeke and Karl Scotland have been on Twitter overnight suggesting they’d like to see FDD content presented at Agile 2009.

Recently there has been renewed interest in FDD from the BDD/Feature Injection community in London (Liz Keogh, Chris Matts). There is also growing interest in domain-driven approaches to design and development and this has renewed interest in color modeling.

If I see sufficient demand I will prod some FDD folks such as Stephen Palmer, Daniel Vacanti and others and see if we can get a couple of submissions together.

What specific aspects of FDD would you like highlighted and why do you think it would be interesting? On hhich stage at Agile 2009 should FDD appear? Strangely it feels like an Agile Frontier topic because it is fringe, slow burning and unfashionable but that is so weird for what was one of the original agile methods. Technorati tag: Agile+2009, Agile+Alliance, FDD, Feature+Driven+Development, Domain+Driven+Design, Color+Modeling, Peter+Coad

Karl Scotland Discusses Required Level of Maturity for Kanban

Nice article from Karl Scotland on why Kanban isn’t just for mature teams. I particularly like his conclusion…

It seems to me that there is in fact a subtle difference between kanban and typical agile processes such as Scrum. Scrum focuses on being agile which may (and should) lead to improving. Kanban focuses on improving, which may lead to being agile. However, being agile itself is not important - it just happens to be the best way we (or at least I) know at the moment. If a team improves in other ways, then its the improvement that’s important.

I would go a little further. Kanban is a way of insuring sustainable pace. Sustainable pace generally means that slack exists in the system. Slack generates opportunities for people to think about the process and what hinders overall team performance. It is this that leads to improvements being implemented.

Kanban also creates a process that visibly exposes bottlenecks, waste and variability. Hence, kanban exposes improvement opportunities at the same time as providing a system with slack that allows people to focus on implementing improvements.

As Karl says, agility is a potential outcome. A culture of continuous improvement (kaizen) is the goal. Technorati tag: Agile+Management, Software+Engineering, David+Anderson, Kanban, Lean, Karl+Scotland

Agile 2009 - Karl Scotland KFC Submission

Karl Scotland was next to submit for Agile 2009 with a Kanban, Flow and Cadence half day workshop for the coaching stage. Please take the time to support Karl and Kanban at Agile 2009 by reviewing the proposal. Thanks. Technorati tag: Agile+2009, Agile+Alliance, Kanban, Lean, Karl+Scotland