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Limiting how many stories or tasks can occupy any particular activity in a team’s flow is a commonly recommended practice for teams using kanban systems. This way, the team can avoid overloading their system, reduce multitasking, and improve focus and quality. Applying work-in-progress (WIP) limits to kanban systems at the story or task level reveals…
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The Power of Predictable Delivery
9 minutesWith most of the Agile teams I’ve been exposed to, I’ve noticed that they spend easily over a hundred person-hours every month on practices like updating plans, reporting metrics, estimating, and sharing status updates. To them, these are some of the core practices that make them Agile. In general, as a way to be less…
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Manage the Value, Not the Work
7 minutes
Do you think of software development as an exercise in identifying the right problem, doing the right analysis and getting the right people to code the right features? Or is it more of a discovery and learning activity where you make a bet, build something and get feedback? In the former approach, organizations will create…
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I’ve previously written about cross-functional teams and what it means for a team to be cross-functional. In that same post, I wrote about Team Topology’s concept of a stream-aligned team. To recap, stream-aligned teams: Suppose autonomous and independent cross-functional teams that own an entire “slice” of a business domain are the ideal way to organize…
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An Agile Alternative to “Fixing”
4 minutesOne of my go-to definitions of Agile is working in a way of safely making progress and moving forward with imperfect information. In the journey to becoming Agile, organizations face many obstacles. Whatever their goals, there are a lot of organizational, cultural and technical challenges and constraints that teams and organizations face. When faced with…
Flow Focused 