Working with Agile

Let’s talk about methodologies…

First of all, I think that every team should use a methodology to work or reach a target.

In my experience such as a software developer, I have lived the differences between work without a methodology and work with a metodology…trying these two approches, I have understood that a methodology is really essential…

Some years ago I have discovered the Agile movement, in particular two Agile frameworks: Scrum and Kanban.

Scrum is an Agile framework and is very useful to work on a product such as a software product. I believe that in Scrum a product is like a baby and each actor involved in the Scrum process has the priority to care this baby.
The main actors involved in a Scrum process are the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and the Dev team and the Scrum process provides several meeting during a Scrum cycle.

Kanban is an Agile framework and is very useful to work on projects. In this case there aren’t main actors because in Kanban there aren’t fixed roles. The Kanban process is like a flow without end and a key concept in this framework is the WIP limit (Max number of activities that can be in progress at the same time).

For Scrum and Kanban is essential render visible the work flow on a board which can be a physical board (I usually prefer this kind of board) or a virtual board (this kind of board is useful for teams in different locations).
Display a flow is very important because in this way is more simple to disclose bottlenecks and solve it.

I want to close this article talking about some software to use for Scrum and Kanban. The first one is Trello and the second one is Kanbanize, I have experience with the first one and I have used it with my Dev Team for several cases (collaboration cross-team, public roadmap, etc)….