Posts Tagged ‘Walter Bodwell’
A Special Technical Debt Offer from the Cutter Consortium
The good folks at Cutter are making the October Issue of the Cutter IT Journal (CITJ) available to anyone who is interested in getting deeper into the intricacies of technical debt. Here is the table of contents for this issue:
- Opening Statement by Israel Gat
- Modernizing the DeLorean System: Comparing Actual and Predicted Results of a Technical Debt Reduction Project by John Heintz
- The Economics of Technical Debt by Stephen Chin, Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, and Israel Gat
- Technical Debt: Challenging the Metaphor by David Rooney
- Manage Project Portfolios More Effectively by Including Software Debt in the Decision Process by Brent Barton and Chris Sterling
- The Risks of Acceptance Test Debt by Ken Pugh
- Transformation Patterns for Curing the Human Causes of Technical Debt by Jonathon Michael Golden
- Infrastructure Debt: Revisiting the Foundation by Andrew Clay Shafer
Being the guest editor for this issue, I can attest better than anyone else how much I learned from the various authors, from Karen Pasley (the October issue editor) and Chris Generali (CITJ Editor-in-Chief).
Click here for details of this special offer including downloading instruction.
Apropos is Going Places
Pictured above is a screen shot from the forthcoming Rally implementation of Apropos – the end-to-end Kanban system unveiled by Erik Huddleston, Stephen Chin, Walter Bodwell and me in the Lean Software and Systems conference last April.
Pictured below is Stephen Chin presenting the forthcoming product in the recent JavaOne conference:
The commercial version by Rally builds on the four pillars of the original implementation of Apropos at Inovis and the subsequent open source version:
- Stakeholder Based Investment Themes
- Business Case Management
- Upstream and Downstream WIP Limits
- Dynamic Allocations
These four pillars enable Apropos users to dynamically adjust their plans as needed in accord with the realities of end-to-end execution. Agile portfolio planning and actual execution truly run alongside each other as depicted in the following figure:
Adjustments to allocations can take place in either in the plan or in execution. Here are two typical examples of stakeholders’ dialogs:
- In planning: “In response to the quick growth of the sales funnel, we decide to increase the % of time allotted to tactical sales opportunities from 35% of the total R&D budget to 40%.”
- In execution: “The introduction of product Pj will be delayed by three months due to lack of qualified professional services resources. During this period, the affected R&D resources will be reassigned to help with multi-tenant aspects of a SaaS version of product Pk.”
Recommendations: Consider using the open source version of Apropos for a small-scale pilot as part of your 2011 planning/budget cycle. If the pilot proves a good fit with your needs, switch over to the commercial version in the 2012 planning/budget cycle.
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Considering end-to-end Agile/Kanban roll-out? Let me know if you would like assistance in planning and implementing a roll-out which focuses on continuous value delivery. Click Services for details.
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Apropos has been Open Sourced
Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, Stephen Chin and I unveiled Apropos – the Agile Project Portfolio Scheduler – a month ago in the LSSC10 conference in Atlanta, GA. The system is now available as open source. Click here to go to the home page of the project and download the software. It will enable you to:
- Synergies R&D with downstream organizations such as Operations, Professional Services, and Sales
- Increase delivery value through organization-wide alignment of priorities
- Achieve continuous improvement by whole process feedback loops
- Gain realtime visibility into delivery status and potential blockages
The core concept of Apropos – multiple parallel feedback loops – is demonstrated by the following process control diagram:
Figure 1: Process Control View of Apropos
Enjoy Apropos, benefit from it and please give us feedback!
Open-Sourcing the Inovis End-to-End Kanban System
Source: Gat, Huddleson, Bodwell and Chin, “Reformulating the Product Delivery Process“
Colleague and “partner in crime” Stephen Chin has published a post on the Inovis End-to-End Kanban System (aka Apropos) we presented at the LSSC10 conference on April 23. As readers of this blog might recall, the system tracks features through their full life-cycle from proposal to validation, ensuring actionable feedback cycles. By so doing it firmly anchors the software method in the overall business context with special attention to operational aspects such as deployment, monitoring and support.
Stephen outlines details of the forthcoming open-sourcing of Apropos as follows:
The plan for this tool is to do the initial launch of a BSD-licensed open-source version on May 22nd. This will include support for the Rally Community Edition, which is free for up to 10 users. In future releases we plan to support other Agile Lifecycle Management tools, both commercial and open-source, but will need assistance from the community to do this.
If you are interested in helping out with this project, please contact me. I will have limited bandwidth until after the initial launch, but after that would love to scale up this project with interested parties.
I really can’t wait till the 22nd. IMHO Apropos has the potential to become the leading Kanban system by the community for the community.
Apropos – The Inovis End-to-End Kanban System
Figure 1: End-to-end flow slide from Reformulating the Product Delivery Process
Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, Stephen Chin and I delivered a presentation at LSSC10 on the design and implementation of the end-to-end Kanban system Apropos at Inovis. The presentation highlights four key ingredients of the ‘secret sauce’ that makes Apropos so powerful:
- Stakeholder Based Investment Themes
- Business Case Management
- Upstream and Downstream WIP Limits
- Dynamic Allocations
You can read the slides here. A recording of the presentation will soon be posted by InfoQ. A commercial friendly open-source license of the code will be available on May 22, 2010.
Reformulating the Product Delivery Process
Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, Stephen Chin and I will present and demo an end-to-end Kanban system that addresses the #1 challenge modern software methods pose – reformulation of the product delivery process. We will do so the coming Friday, April 23, 10:45AM at the Lean Software and Systems Conference. Here is the abstract for our presentation/demo:
Software methods can be viewed as the glue that holds the product development process together. With Kanban, the glue is melting on both sides of the process. Traditional portfolio management systems and organizations have difficulty coping with the granularity of Kanban. Likewise, today’s product release and delivery systems and the corresponding organizational constructs are ill-equipped to effectively handle the Kanban flow.
We present a field-tested system for implementing Kanban on an end-to-end basis – from product ideation through continuous delivery. This system reformulates the deconstructed product delivery process to strike an optimal balance between planning, development and operations.
Predicting the Year Ahead
Cutter Consortium has published predictions for 2010 by about a dozen of its experts. My own prediction, which examines the crash of 1929, the burst of the “dot-com bubble” in 2000 and the financial collapse in 2008, is actually quite bullish:
I expect 2010 to be the first year of a prolonged golden age. Serious as the various problems we all are wrestling with after the 2008-2009 macro-economic crisis are, they should be viewed as systemic to the way a new generation of revolutionary infrastructure gets assimilated in economy and society.
In addition to the techno-economic view expressed in the Cutter prediction, here are my Agile themes for 2010:
- Agile moves “downstream” into Release Management.
- Agile breaks out of Development into IT (and beyond) in the form of Agile Infrastructure and Agile Business Service Management.
- SOA and Agile start to be linked in enterprise architecture and software/hardware/SaaS organizations.
- Kanban starts an early adoption cycle similar to Scrum in 2006.
Acknowledgements: I am thankful to my colleagues Walter Bodwell, Sebastian Hassinger, Erik Huddleston, Michael Cote and Annie Shum who influenced my thinking during 2009 and contributed either directly and indirectly to the themes listed above.
What Sony Showed at Their Shareholders Meeting
Strictly speaking this video might not be considered an Agile topic. I would just say I had never seen as dramatic a demonstration of the importance of cadence as this artful “Did You Know?” video.
Many thanks to colleague Walter Bodwell for bringing this fascinating video to my attention.
Reflections on The Use of Agile Methods by the Entrepreneur
Walter Bodwell has posted his reflections on The Use of Agile Methods by the Entrepreneur. To quote Walter’s summary:
It looked at agile from a different point of view than typically done.
See here for the full review of the presentation by Walter.
The Agile Executive 