Tag Archives: agile

Kanbanize Helps Product Development Teams Go Lean

The future of product development in software was born at the factories of Toyota in Aichi. The Kanban method is the reason the Japanese car manufacturer overtook huge titan car companies from all over the world and now sells the most units per year out of all of them. Formerly only applied to manufacturing, the Kanban method they pioneered is now a large part of how Lean product development teams in the software industry are optimizing their process on a day-to-day basis. Kanbanize has built a tool to help product development and IT ops teams practice the Kanban method in their work in order to continuously improve and reach their goals. Find out the ways Kanban and Kanbanize make efficiency happen.

Convinced about self-organized teams

Agile tag cloud

When we started building websites professionally in 1996, we were still operating on intuition. Meticulous project planning was foreign to us. The business developed, we grew and quickly reached a point where we began looking for professional processes for developing our projects. We tried several (Gantt-Charts with MS Project and project checklists we developed ourselves), but none had the result we hoped for. For a while, project managers could decide how they wanted to develop their projects.

Codeyard Building Blocks – Atlassian’s HipChat, Confluence, JIRA, Bitbucket and Bamboo together

Codeyard is our all-in-one-project solution for every Atlassian tool installed, configured and heavily used with your employees. It is a concept to launch approach that most product and service companies need to offer their customers to create value. Let’s talk about the Atlassian tool stack and how users can use it as a holistic solution to delivering value to customers (with or without software).

Our Codeyard Theme: Create your own Intranet Software

Today is my first productive Codeyard day. Codeyard is our new all in one Atlassian solution and will hopefully become as successful as our Linchpin intranet solution based on Confluence. It offers the full Atlassian stack (HipChat, Confluence, JIRA, Bitbucket, Bamboo) including all required professional services (organizational and cultural coaching, consulting, installation, configuration, …) at a guaranteed fixed price.

Questions for Confluence – Should I be using it and how?

This post is both for people running Confluence and those using it. It tries to help you understand what the benefits of Questions for Confluence (formerly: Confluence Questions) are and why you and your co-workers may want to adopt it. This is not based on quantitative research. What you are reading is my best effort to help you with the knowledge and experience I have.

99 Reasons for Scrum: How service providers benefit from Scrum projects

We have discussed the Scrum framework in software development in various of our blogs and in our wiki. The conclusion has always been: it is not an easy task to establish agile methods, however, Scrum is always worth it. In this series of articles, we have collected 99 reasons, why customers, coworkers, and service provider equally benefit from Scrum. In the last two articles, we explored how the customers and how staff benefits from Scrum. The last article lists the benefits of Scrum projects for service providers:

99 Reasons for Scrum: How staff benefits from Scrum projects

We have discussed the Scrum framework in software development in various of our blogs and in our wiki. The conclusion has always been: it is not an easy task to establish agile methods, however, Scrum is always worth it. In this series of articles, we have collected 99 reasons, why customers, coworkers, and service provider equally benefit from Scrum. In the last article, we explored how the customers benefit. This article focuses on the benefits of Scrum projects for staff:

Reasons why you as customer should test your new software intensively and at an early stage

The core of agile software development according to Scrum is regularly releasing product increments to the customer. The software’s functions are gradually extended, but the customer receives a version of their software right after the first sprint. That’s why at the end of each sprint, a review meeting is held where the development team presents the new functions to the customer. In this article, we will explain why it makes sense for the customer to participate in the reviews and why they should test the software created for them intensively and at an early stage.

There’s life in paper yet: The InstaPrinta prints customized JIRA tickets for analog boards

The paper-less office was meant to banish all paper from the office. In agile teams, however, this does not apply and this is where InstaPrinta comes in. Admittedly, a tool like Atlassian’s JIRA is a great way to manage tasks. However, in day-to-day work, a digital Agile Board in JIRA does not have the same presence as a large magnet board right in the center a team office that is full of task notes. At a glance, every team member knows what needs to be done and who is working on what. Furthermore, the magnet board contains numerous additional sections like an improvement board, a skill matrix, an absence calendar and more. This makes the analog board the central “cockpit” for all information relevant to the teams.

Hackathon at //SEIBERT/MEDIA – Field report on developing the EasyEvents plugin for Confluence

The goal of a hackathon is to buckle down and create a product and/or complete a small project under time pressure (at //SEIBERT/MEDIA within 24 hours). The hackathon team alone plans and decides what kind of product or project to work on. We explained the reasons for regularly conducting hackathons in our agile organization in more detailed articles. On the one hand, we strive to create concrete and truly innovative solutions. On the other hand, we try to attain “soft” effects, such as promoting training, teamwork and personal responsibility and motivating our employees. Our latest hackathon took place in early July 2013. In the following chronological field report, we offer insight into the work of the team that designed and developed the EasyEvents Confluence plugin.