Steve Sanderson

Lots of buzz lately about kanban / lean in software development. While  watching this from the sidelines, I’ve also been looking at my current team and previous teams and gauging applicability.

With my current team (at FiveRuns), we hit a point a while ago where the team began to reject the extra formality and overhead in some of our scrum practices (e.g. sprint planning, release planning) and began to smooth our rhythm out until we ended up, more or less, as continuous-flow.

The great thing is, I’ve looked back on earlier teams and seen similar trends – but different results. This time (for me) reality & results were stronger than dogma & fear – so we went with what made us better.

Then, I stumbled across Kanban Development Oversimplified and passed it out – it’s a great quick & simple overview.

It’s not good enough to be doing something… I’ve got to build something related. So, combine this with the desire to get some more experience with some new shiny bits (standalone apps on couchdb) and ta da: a simple board with cards + columns to represent our worfklow (surely a cliched application, along with blogs); the board will be a centralized service and a de-centralized service (ref: git) so that people can take their own copy of the board with them – keep using it – and sync up with either the centralized service or another instance, as needed. More later: I’ll post some cucumber scenarios and then a link to the project on github.