Corporate Coder

I took a vacation down to my favortie city, Orlando!  Actually Lake Buena Vista FL, home of Walt Disney World!  So of course the week of Thanksgiving, I wasn't Kanbanning,  but visiting the parks at WDW.  I'm always impressed with how the Disney company can handle the amount of crowds that they do.  If you're ever interested in queuing theory about that type of thing, I recommend Schumla's articles on queuing, specifically on Disneylands fastpass, and other queing articles.

Back to our Kanban meetings.  My last post was on our beginning the Kanban meetings for change management.  I've had lot's of questions on certain aspects of the Kanban system over the past 2 weeks.  I'd recommend asking questions of this nature on the Kanban mailing list on yahoo.  Many experts interested in this new system are available there.  One thing the kanban has uncovered is that I'm a bottleneck right now for deploying our changes to a testing environment.  We're looking at ways to change that.  Another is that we need better feedback for the team.  Right now we're doing it electronically, and it's mainly displaying the Kanban in Excel spreadsheets. Our other reports (Cycle Times etc.) are also in these spreadsheets.

The other idea with our electronic Kanban, is that we want to integrate this into our Team Foundation Server (TFS) instance.  The trick is to integrate with our legacy change ticket system.  Angela Binkowski from Microsoft helped out by suggesting a TFS extension from codeplex, called TFS Migration and Syncronization toolkit, which may help us to connect to our legacy system to TFS.  If that can be accomplished I can write reports using the TFS backend, which seems to be easier to report off of then our change ticket legacy system.  Also, we can tie change tickets to code checkin's and allow team members to enter information in one place.  I'll keep updating on this, and perhaps an article can result out of this as well.

Other feedback on the meetings are to KEEP IT TO 15 MINUTES.  We've let that get out of hand, and we've got a lot of waste in that time.