I was able to attend an enjoyable Agile SA meeting for a short while last night where once again the drinks and the snacks where a huge hit. Unfortunately, I believe that it was the last meeting for 2010.

Arrie van der Dussen from Agile SA gave a presentation on KANBAN. He started with a brief history of KANBAN and its origin in the TOYOTA production line. He continued explaining the concepts which most of us are familiar with, using our SA Home Loans KANBAN board as a guideline. Our KANBAN board has gone through quite a few changes, so it was good to know that we are doing things right. It’s amazing that even though we follow the KANBAN methodology on a daily basis we are still able to learn something new in these meetings. One concept that was new to me was the topic of waste, which basically is, anything that is incomplete, which means anything that is in “Work In Progress” is waste if it is not pulled through the process and delivered.

He did mention some controversial stuff which raised a few eye brows, such as twiddling your thumbs in KANBAN is a good thing, something we here at SA Homeloans don’t have the opportunity to test yet. Another thing that he spoke about which made sense was doing things slower could lead to things getting done faster. Greater quality of the work going through the system means less back and forth movement on the KANBAN board from TEST back to Work In Progress. He ended the presentation showing the importance and the role of the scrum master by showing us a video of a busy highway in Britain where there was an unexplainable traffic jam on a well designed highway. It showed how you could not see the problem while driving in the traffic (referring here to developers actually in the process doing the work) but if you had an aerial view of the highway, you could see what was causing the backlog in traffic. So the scrum master cannot be a developer who is technically involved in the process, he/she has to keep an overhead view of the process identifying the flaws and “traffic jams” and removing them from the process.

I unfortunately missed the last half of the evening where the SA Home Loans, Agrista, and Clyral Kanban boards were displayed and discussed, but it was a lovely relaxed evening, well organised once again, with a good turn-out of individuals from different organisations using Agile Methods in their daily lives, chatting and sharing experiences both good and bad. Can’t wait for the next one at the end of Jan 2011.

Ashish Singh, Developer – November 2010