FuoEg going Agile - Part I
For quite sometime now, I have attempted to adopt agile at FuoEg with no success. Every now and then I read about Scrum or Kanban and it makes sense to me, sounds very reasonable for our team, and looks affordable to adopt. However, I never managed to do it :( This time I hope stars are aligned and we have what it takes for a successful 'Agile Adoption'. I will try to keep diaries of what we are doing and how it goes for later reference by myself and hopefully someone else can make use of it.
At FuoEg, I manage a small team of developers where we provide mobile development services for other entities. It is common to be working on multiple projects semi-simultaneous each contracted with a predefined budget and deadline. The main reasons I would like to adopt agile, and I am not sure if agile will really help or not, are:
Better release management and planning.
Track work in progress and identify work flow bottlenecks.
Record performance metrics for better future estimation.
Initially I was going for Scrum as a popular technique, however Kanban seems more flexible to use and hence more appealing to adopt. As I like things to be organized as possible, I will try to add some Scrum practices to our Kanban adoption. Also, we are using Unfuddle as a project management tool for few years now so it is very hard to drop it and migrate to another agile-orientd tool. I will try to make the best use of already available features in Unfuddle by mapping them to agile concepts. To achieve this, I will build a small tool to serve as an agile layer above Unfuddle current functionality. I will try to add extra features to be more agile while trying to keep it as generic as possible for others to use (but no promises :) )
My first step will to draft a design for our Kanban board with definitions and guidelines. Next, I will develop a tool which integrates with Unfuddle API and visualize the Kanban board based on it. After a trial period, I will start assigning work in progress limits based on our current bottlenecks and system flaws. At the moment, we have a project in its very beginning and another one in its very end so I think this will be a good exercise to notice the different practices of adopting agile on new and running projects.
That's all for now. Stay tuned.