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We are starting to use Kanban and my boss just asked me a question, as one of two people with prior Kanban experience within the group, that I don't really know how to answer.
My previous experience and training with Kanban had developers pulling stories in from the backlog by priority, in our case that was the topmost card. However, my boss would like certain stories to go to the developers that have domain knowledge for particular areas. For example, let's say Joe has the most experience in working with Contracts and a contract story comes onto the board. He would like Joe to be the one to work on that particular story.
This, to me, feels a little "off" and could lead to some developers having significant extra work due to having worked in any given area of functionality. My previous experience with Kanban worked under the assumption that any developer should be able to pick up the next card and figure out what to do and that this practice would eventually eliminate any single functionality area experts and level out developer expertise over time. However, I can also see how using subject matter experts can help move a story through the process faster.
What is the most "Kanban" way of handling priority vs. expertise when it comes to pulling in the next story?
Every system I've ever worked with allows a little bit of developer-level of prioritization. If the next card has the absolute (top-down driven) priority, then you have to pick that card. Mostly, though, I tend to work in places where "these next 6 cards are up, pick the one you like". This gives the developer a little bit of room for type of work he or she prefers. Plus, it gives the developers a greater sense of ownership since they did get to pick (to some extent) the work they were doing.
Regarding your example, it's a little off base. In an ideal world any developer should be able to pick up any card. In reality, this isn't always true. If I give this project to Jim, it might take 2 days. If I give it to not-Jim, it make take all week. This is a sign! What information sharing is missing? How do you get the other developers to understand the Contracts component as well as Jim?
If the priority is a little bit gray, this stuff tends to work itself out. All the other developers know that Jim can handle the Contracts stuff. However, if Jim has no capacity, then someone else must take up the challenge. Kanban is supposed to alert you to blocked stories.
Kanban is great for visualizing work flow, limiting WIP, and exposing bottle necks.
Henrik Kniberg has a great book, 'Lean from the Trenches'. He talks through many techniques he has used in real world examples. He described one approach to having avatars (that represent developers) that can be placed over task to show who is working on what.
One idea for your situation, would be to use this avatar approach to pre-assigning who should work on a task in the buffer leading into development.
If those pre-assigned tasks are not causing bottlenecks and flow is natural, everything is good. If they are causing bottlenecks early in your flow, you have a problem, but now you have an easy way to visualize and see that it is the pre-assigning that is causing your bottle neck!
A Kanban system shall display the real process. If the manager is assigning stories to developer then the system should reflect that. This can be done in several ways, you could have a specific item for developer X or you can write the developers name on the card. Another option is to have one swim-lane for each developer.
However, all of this is probably not good from a "global" perspective. You should share your Kanban data with your boss. What are your lead-times, what is your throughput etc? Then you should invite the boss to the process improvment meeting. How are we going to improve our figures? Hopefully he sees that Joe probably will be a bottleneck if he is assigning tasks directly to him. Teach him Littles Law, teach him about bottlenecks and Lean in general.
Don't forget to make your policies explicit, that is, it should be written on the wall how your prioritzation policy looks like. Good luck!
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What kind of software development (projects) can kanban be used for and what are the requirements to implement it? I was reading a lot about kanban and how great it is. But now i have to write a paper about it that focuses of the requirements for kanban, and especially for what kind of projects kanban doesen't fit. I couldn't figure it out yet.
KarlM gave a good overview.
I think Kanban can be used in any project, because it takes your existing process and visualizes it, introduces WIP (multitasking) limits, and uses pull to maximize flow and minimize lead time. My team recently migrated to Scrum and it's been a very smooth transition so far.
Kanban is especially good for situations in which a standard iteration doesn't make sense.
For example, you might not have frequent releases. Maybe you want to decouple one or more of your planning, demo, retrospective, or release schedules.
Good examples:
Maintenance project. Even though you might want to have 2-week (or whatever) meetings to discuss priority, retrospectives, etc., you're probably not going to demo or release every 2 weeks, and it's not likely you'll be able to commit to everything in the next 2 weeks anyway. Situations like this are so dynamic that the priorities shift every day, as new feedback comes from customers. Scrum or other iterative processes don't make sense in this case.
There is a real need for stories that are longer than your iteration length. Kanban, like Scrum, thrives with small stories (better flow, slack, etc.), BUT, unlike Scrum, it DOES at least allow large stories if really necessary.
Extremely fast-paced development. Continuous deployment. Iterations no longer make sense, because maybe you're responding to change lighting-quick, and maybe releasing multiple times a day!
See code.flickr.com:
Flickr was last deployed 4 hours ago, including 8 changes by 2 people.
In the last week there were 85 deploys of 588 changes by 19 people.
Do you think Flickr is doing 2-week iterations, or even 1-day iterations? I doubt it. Looks like they're in super-speed dynamic flow mode... Maybe Kanban, but definitely looks like they're in the Lean umbrella. (Kanban falls under the umbrella of Lean thinking, and continuous deployment was made popular by last year's book by Eric Ries, "The Lean Startup".)
It might not fit in the following environments:
Organizational culture can't get away from up-front planning, overwork/commitment, push instead of pull, fixing all of schedule, scope, and cost, etc. Kanban will start to provoke continuous improvement in an organization, and many are simply opposed to anything but the traditional overengineering, overdocumented, siloed, non-Lean, non-Agile approach that they know and love, which is waterfall. Some government contracts might also fall under this category, although I believe at least DoD is trying to advance Agile in its projects now. But some companies, if you tell them they need to do LESS (i.e., limit work in progress, have a clearer vision, get less stuff done faster, but therefore more stuff done overall), will have a heart attack. Many (most?) companies are addicted to overwork, and think SLACK (which is a fundamental Lean principle) is a 4-letter word. Unfortunately, queuing theory and theory of constraints is hard to get through some people's heads. :) So Kanban might not fit in those kinds of places. ;)
The requirements are, that everyone on the project agrees to use the principles and practices:
Principles
1. Start with what you do now
2. Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
3. Initially, respect current processes, roles, responsibilities and job titles
4. Encourage acts of leaderships at all levels
Practices
1. Visualise what you do / knowledge discovery
2. Limit work in progress
3. Measure and manage flow
4. Make policies explicit
5. Develop feedback mechanisms
6. Improve collaboratively using models and the scientific method
If they don't agree to do that, they can't use kanban. Pretty clear.
Kanban is a tool for visualizing and improving existing processes. If there's a scenario in which it won't work, that scenario would probably have one or both of two properties.
1) There is no existing process or the existing process is such a disaster that it is not working at all and/or is constantly changing in a chaotic manner.
2) There is no will or opportunity to improve.
Lacking the second is not a deal-breaker. Kanban could still help with communication and coordination, and increasing clarity might lead to an increased desire to improve or help establish trust necessary to empower improvement experiments. That would be an example of a low-maturity Kanban implementation leading to a higher level of team maturity.
Kanban is a simple process tool. Applied well, it is good for any project, not just software - any.
In my opinion Kanban can be implement in any kind of organization and in any industry.
But...
the team must be ready for a change
the change must has an evolutionary character
the organization must be focused on cooperation instead of performing routine work.
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My company is trying to pass a policy forbidding distribution of any application (even free) in any appstore for all developers.
Their reasoning is that "outside work activities create a conflict of interest". They don't want that "you use your spare time to work on your app, and once it takes off you quit your job" (quoting the Head of Development).
A few developers (myself included) have already said it was an abusive, pointless and most of all counter-productive policy (developers will actually be demotivated to work here under such control and to be denied of the freedom to distribute their project).
Personally, I think it is actually in the interest of the company to promote side projects (even commercial activities, if there is no conflict).
I'm also curious, is that common practice?
Needless to say, this is horribly, horribly stupid on so many levels... It may be worth trying to find out whether it's even legal in your jurisdiction.
Anyway and apart from that, if you can, find colleagues who feel the same, and take a stand against it. Try to explain to the management that this is a stupid decision for the company as well. Don't sign anything: A policy like that would probably have to be amended to your work contract to be binding. Chances are, the risk of losing good employees over this outweighs the security they think they get from it.
If there's really nothing that can be done, and you are very unhappy with this (I would be), consider looking for a new job.
As an afterthought, if the practice of limiting your employees' rights to this extent is clearly illegal in your jurisdiction, it could be that simply making them aware of this might stop this without any further trouble.
All companies for which I have worked allowed outside work provided:
no company resources were used (this includes time)
the product of that effort did not directly conflict with the company's interest
the product was not based off of work or specific knowledge gained while working for the company
Typically, companies have a clause in your employment agreement that states that you will inform them when you begin work on outside projects and inform them of the nature so they can approve/deny. In such cases, you want to get that approval in writing.
In your case, this is a pretty difficult situation if this was part of your employment agreement. Even if it isn't, they can fire you for it if your employment is at-will and they find out. Unfortunately, in your situation, you seem to have one of four options:
Convince management that they are being unreasonable.
Fly under the radar and hope you don't get caught.
Find a new job.
Quit and just work on the apps full-time.
If your job is to put out apps in an appstore, though, there's really no way to argue that your outside development of apps for the same appstore isn't a conflict of interest in some respect. If I had to guess, I'd say that either this is the case or you're working for a development manager that doesn't understand the mindset of developers and how they like to tinker and learn outside of work.
While this example sounds a little draconian, it is not uncommon for companies to have some kind of policy regarding outside work. However, this is typically to protect the company from your mistakes rather than to protect them from your departure. If they're that concerned about employees leaving, they should go out of their way to make it the sort of place you would want to stay.
EDIT: I just found this today on a completely unrelated blog, but it totally rings true to this discussion. It's about 11 minutes long, but very entertaining and makes you think too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=player_embedded The TL;DR (TL;DW?): Once you get outside the realm of purely physical tasks, organizations that assume you are motivated by money, hands-on direction, etc. will not accomplish their goals nearly as easily as those that assume you are motivated by desires for autonomy (self-direction, self-management), mastery (getting better at doing something) and contribution to something bigger than yourself.
I believe there was a similar pointless rule when I was under the corporate yoke. I think these rules are pointless, backward and wrong. Instead of keeping their developers management pushes them to look for new managment, well, at least the passionate and talented ones.
Unless your employment contract says otherwise, what you develop in your own time belongs to you.
If they are in the business of writing apps for the appstore, then they might have a non-compete argument against you.
If they allow other types of development projects, it is difficult to see the argument as valid.
Depends on the app and the company.
If you're working for an Android app developer, I'd see why they might not like it. 8)
If it competes directly with what your company produces I can see why they'd prohibit it.
I would consult a lawyer to see just how binding such an agreement would be if you were forced to sign it.
If it's really that odious, your only recourse is to find another employer.
Check your local labor laws. In California, this kind of thing is blatantly illegal.
The policy enumerated by Shaun is reasonable, and something very similar has been in place at most of my previous employers. The one place that tried something like this was quickly pointed at the statute by knowledgable developers, and the "policy" quietly went away.
The answer is in your contract of employment.
But if your job is as a computer programmer, you're almost guaranteed to have something in your employment contract stating that any software you write either in work or outside of work is owned by the company.
If you get written permission from HR and your manager, then if you were to make millions from you out of hours projects, then it would be more difficult for your employer to just take ALL those millions off of you.
I was recently asked by a Team Leader (not mine) if I would be willing to undertake a programming project. The members of his team are currently pre-occupied with other more important projects. I graduated college two years ago, and up until now programming has only been a hobby of mine. Recently I decided that I would like to pursue a career in software development. I accepted his offer so that I can gain some real-world experience and start building a portfolio.
In about an hour I'm scheduled to meet with the Team Leader to discuss the details of what he needs. From a short e-mail exchange with him, I know that the base project is to update an existing ASP.NET form—but I also think there's more to it than that.
Considering that I'd like to eventually put this project in a portfolio, what kinds of notes should I take at the meeting?
Take whatever notes you can that will best help you understand the use cases and the user requirements. Everything else is just technical details that can be figured out later.
I graduated college two years ago, and up until now programming has only been a hobby of mine.
In that case, my suggestion is:
revel in your ignorance.
Make the most of the fact that you know nothing and you're being given an opportunity to learn - abuse the chance to ask as many questions as possible of the Team Leader in question regarding what type of questions you should be asking and how you should be documenting what you learn.
You only get one chance to be ignorant, once you've wasted it you have to spend the rest of your life as a know-it-all; take the chance to enjoy the learning process.
Get a list of people who are the intended users. Talking with them will allow you to flesh out the overview that the Team Leader gives you. It is likely that the intended users have a very different understanding of what the app is supposed to do than the TL does. So you'll likely be going back and forth for a while. It's well worth the effort though because you'll do much less re-coding.
Try to understand that the Team Leader him/herself might not even have all the requirements available right at the beginning. Be prepared to be hunting down people and writing all these requirements down as they come in.
Things will change during development, new problems and new requirements will always be popping up.
Three things:
What: What is the software supposed to do, the more detailed you can manage to get the other person to be, the better.
How: Are there any known constraints? For example, if it has to ask for a telephone number, does it have to validate nationally/internationally/not at all. Does it have to run on Windows 2008/2003/all
Who: Two sides:
Who will answer any questions you'll have, will you setup weekly progress meetings?
Who will use the software, can you get their early input on your prototypes, can you ask them for opinion/requirements?
One thing I've found very helpful is carrying a hard-copy of any existing requirements (use cases, wireframes, whatever) or any other potentially useful information in a 3 ring binder to any project meetings I attend. If the meeting strays off topic or questions about previous discussions or documents come up it is very nice to have the information at your fingertips in a format you can make notes on, pass around the table etc.
As a bonus, I find most people don't carry any documents to meetings, so you'll also end up looking like you are a real go-getter who is always prepared, which is never a bad thing.
Main downside to this is that you'll waste paper if the documents are updated and changed frequently.
Find out the where as well, where are the files you need stored on the network, where is the source control repository for the project, etc.
Since this is your first taste of doing a real world project, please please please make sure you use source control even if you are the only dev on the project. Your co-workers will thank you and you will thank you the first time you need to back out a change that didn't work.
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when starting with a project and using source control i find it hard to separate the things people are working on so they don't either write duplicate code or think it should be named one thing and so on.
this problem diminishes over time because the general foundation is in place and it's easier to separate the tasks so they don't overlap as much
how do you manage working with source control in the beginning phase?
EDIT:
I can see that it don't really have anything to do with source control, but it gets more apparent when you have source control too. so the question becomes more along the lines of "how do you manage to separate the tasks so they don't overlap too much. I think it's really hard and i haven't really seen much about how to do it.
Well, as far as source control goes, somebody needs to take the lead and set up the basic structure of the project, directories, etc. and communicate it to the team. On projects I work on, this is usually an architect or senior developer, someone who knows the best practices for project organization for the team/company.
With respect to avoiding having multiple people working on the same tasks, that's a project management function; someone needs to determine what tasks need to be done, and communicate it to the team. If you are working in an agile/scrum environment, the team may divide and hand out work items amongst themselves, but in either case you need to communicate to avoid doing the same work twice.
EDIT
To address the issue of multiple people working on the same task, I tend to work on smaller teams, 2-6 people; in this environment, I have had a lot of success with a scrum-influenced approach using the Crystal Clear methodology:
Architect(s)/designer(s) come up with high level design
Architect(s)/designer(s) define iterations/deliveries, the first of which is a "project skeleton" which consists of architectural and back-end components and a thin slice of the app
Lead person breaks up features into 1-3 day tasks/units of work (estimated)
Team meets and discusses priority, timing and dependencies of tasks, and divides up the first set of tasks
The team has brief daily meetings to discuss status/priorities and dependencies, and change direction if necessary
With larger projects/teams, you will almost certainly need someone whose main job is dedicated to tracking status, dependencies and conflicts.
I don't think source control has much to do with the problem of coordinating people's efforts (except that it can catch some "conflicts" when people erroneously try to modify the same files in different ways -- but, that's not as good as preventing conflicts, and even just "preventing conflicts" does not per se ensure that everybody is working on what they should ideally be working right now, in terms of priorities). Coordination is properly managed with practices (and perhaps tools, e.g. Pivotal Tracker -- but, using the right practices is even more important than using nice tools!-) that specifically focus on ensuring coordination. For example, the practices that Tracker is designed to support and enhance, such as story-based iterative planning, and other compatible ones, such as stand-ups, offer ways to meet these needs.
You must be having a base version that everyone is using, check that into the repository, and then make incremental changes to the repository, make sure that everyone works on different part of the code, commit every working change, and resolve conflicts as and when they occur. That is how I would do it.
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I'm working in a small company and weeks away from deploying a web-app that will be used a lot. Everyone at one location will have to learn to use it, and although I think it's pretty easy and intuitive I may be biased.
I've written a help guide with plenty of screenshots that's available on every page, but I'll still need to train everyone. What's the best way? How do you take a step back and explain code you've been working on for weeks?
First try to avoid the training:
Perform usability testing to ensure your web app is intuitive. Usability testing is a very important aspect of testing and it is often ignored. How you see your system will probably be very different as how a new user sees your system.
Also add contextual help as often as you can. For example when I hover over a tag in stack overflow, I know exactly what clicking it will do, because it tells me.
Also this may seem obvious, but make sure you link to your documentation from the site itself. People may not think of looking in your documentation unless its right in front of their eyes.
About training documentation:
Try to split up your material into how your users would use the system. I personally like the "trails" option that Sun created for their Java tutorials. In this tutorial you can do several things, and you can chose on which trail you'd like to go.
Support random reads in your help documentation. If they have a task to do in your web app, then they should be able to get help on that without reading a bunch of unrelated content.
Make sure your documentation is searchable.
About actual training sessions:
If you are actually performing training sessions, stay away from explaining anything related to your code at all. You don't need to know about the engine to drive a car.
Try to split up your training sessions into very focused aspects of your system. If you only have 1 training session available to you then just do one specialized use case of your system + the overall description of the system. Refer to the different parts of documentation where they can get help.
Letting the community help itself:
No matter how extensive your documentation is, you'll always have cases that you didn't cover. That's why it's a good idea to have a forum available to all users of the system. Allow them to ask each other questions.
You can review this forum and add content to your documentation as needed.
You could also open up a wiki for the documentation itself, but this is probably not desirable if your user base isn't very large.
Few ideas:
Do you have some canned walk-through scenarios? Don't know if it is applicable for your product, but I built a pretty substantial product a couple years ago and developed some training modules that they'd work through - nothing long, maybe 15 minutes tops for each one.
I put together a slide presentation that hit the highlights to talk about what it does. I would spend about 10 minutes going through the app's highlights to familiarize them with it before doing the hands-on stuff.
People don't tend to read stuff, unfortunately. You could put hours and hours into a help document, and still find that folks simply don't read it or skim over it. That can be frustrating. Expect that answers that are in your guide will be the topic of questions your users will have.
Break up any training you do into manageable chunks. I've been to a full-day training exercise before and the trainer broke it into short pieces and made it easy for me to get the training topic in my head. You don't want to data-dump on them because their eyes will gloss over and you'll lose them.
Ultimately, if your app is highly usable, it should be a piece of cake. If it isn't, you'll find out. You might want to have a few folks you know run through your training ahead of time and give you constructive criticism on it. Better to fix it before the big group is trained. You'll be more confident in the product and the training materials (whatever they are) and you'll likely have a better training experience.
If applicable, provide an online help/wiki/faq for them. Sometimes that is helpful.
Best of luck!
You should really have addressed this issue a lot earlier in the development cycle than you are doing.
In my view the ideal scenario for corporate software is one where the users design their own application and write their own documentation and I always try to strive for this. You should have identified key users early on and designed the system with them (I try to get my users to do basic screen designs and menu layouts in Excel or similar - then I implement that as static pages and review before writing a line of significant code, obviously they won't get the design right first time, but it's your job to guide them - and ideally in a way where they think they came up with the correct design decisions, not you :-) ).
These users should then write the user documentation from this design in parallel with you developing the system. I have never seen help documentation delivered by a IT department/software company used significantly in a corporate setting. Instead what happens is the users will create their own folder of notes and work-arounds and refer to this (in fact if you're ever doing system analysis to replace an existing system finding the 'user-bible' for the old system is a key strategy). Getting the users to write their own documentation up-front simply harnesses what will happen anyway - but this is vastly easier if the users feel they have ownership of the system because they designed it themselves in the first place.
Of course this approach needs commitment and time from your users, but generally it's not that hard a sell. It's trite, but working as a facilitator so the users can develop there own system rather than as a third party to give them a system pretty much guarantees user acceptance.
As you are where you are you're too late to implement all of this, but if you can identify a couple of keen, key, users and get time from them to write their own documentation then that would be a good move. If you can't get even that then you need to identify an evangelist who you can train to be the 'departmental' expert and give them 110% of your energy to support them.
The bottom line is that user acceptance is based on perception, and this does not necessarily correlate with how usable an system actually is. You have to focus on the group psychology of this as much as the reality of the system, which tends to be tricky for developers as we're much more factually based than most people.
I'll be looking into something like this too in the next few months.
In your case, hopefully the UI has already undergone user acceptance testing. You say you work in a small company. Is it possible to get the least tech-savvy person there to try it out? In fact, get them to try it out without any guidance from yourself except for questions they ask. Document the questions and make sure your user-guide answers them.
The main thing for me would be logic and consistency. If the app's workflow relates logically to the task it has been designed to accomplish and the UI is consistent you should be OK.
Create a wiki page to describe the use of your system. Giving edit rights to the users of your system lets the users:
update the documentation to correct any errors in the initial release of documentation,
share any tips on usage they may have found.
share unusual uses for the system that you may not have thought of.
request features.
provide any workarounds they've found while waiting for the new functionality to be implemented.
Try a few users first, one or two in a small company. Mostly watch, help as little as possible. This tells you what needs to be fixed, and it creates an experienced user base - so you are not the "training bottleneck" anymore.
Turn core requirements/use cases/storycards into HowTo / walkthroughs for your documentation.
For a public training, prepare a 10..15 minute presentation (just that, not more!) that covers key concepts that the users absolutely must understand, than show your core walkthroughs. Reserve extra time for questions about how to solve various tasks.
Think as a user, not as a techie: - noone cares if it's a SQL database and you spent a lot of time to get the locking mechanisms right. They do care about "does it slow me down" and "does something bad happen when two people do that at the same time". Our job is to make complicated things look easy.
It may help to put the documentation on the intranet in an editable form - page "comments", or wiki maybe. And/or put up a "error wiki" for error messages and blips - where you or your users can quickly add recomendations, workarounds and reasons for anything that does not go as expected.
Rather then train all those people I have chosen a few superusers (at least one person from each department) and trained them to teach the rest of the employees. It is of course vital that those super users are
well respected in their departments
able to teach
like the application
The easy way to ensure that they like the app is to have them to define the way it should work :-). Since they should work with this app each and every day they are the prime stakeholders, no matter what management states