June 2009

It's been 6 months since we published the pilot issue of TargetProcess Edge of Chaos: Agile development newsletter. Apologies for the delay with the second issue - we've been busy working to make the product still more flexible and intuitive. In these 6 months, we've covered the way from 2.12 to 2.14 releases sticking to our promise to gradually come up with TP 3.0, not in one huge release, but in several smaller releases.

You're very welcome to share your opinion on our work.

Agile Development Insight with Michael Dubakov

Discussions and buzz around Kanban have been really interesting for the last several weeks. More and more people try Kanban and more and more report a success. In my opinion Kanban is a really good approach for maintanence and support activities, if you have an extremely high uncertainty level of new requests and bugs.

I've combined a nice list of articles, blogs, presentations about Kanban. Check it out.

TargetProcess News

We've released v.2.14 in June. Significant changes are:

• Custom fields of TargetProcess Entities type (Feature, Iteration, Release, User Story, Task, Build, etc). For example, you may associate Bug with Build using custom field. The solution is extremely flexible and you may set any relations you need.
• Dependency management via custom fields.
• Full two-ways integration on bug updates between TargetProcess and TestTrackPro.
• Quickly assign Story or Task to yourself. If you need to assign it to someone else, grouping by Roles help to find required person.

We're going to provide full Kanban support in TargetProcess. First two things that you will see soon are Kanban Board and Cumulative Flow Chart. Later we want to include option to turn off iterations and even effort. Thus TargetProcess will provide a great flexibility for development process customization.

Hot Agile Topics of The Month

Kanban has been a hot topic in May and June. Here are two most interesting blog posts from Jeff Patton and Karl Scotland:

• Kanban Development Oversimplified. Jeff Patton provides a very good introduction into Kanban: "Kanban thinking in software development attempts to do a similar thing. We want to limit unnecessary work in progress to be no higher than it needs to be to match the throughput of the team. Kanban thinking applied to Agile development results in sweeping changes that throw out much of what Agile practitioners consider necessary practice."
• Kanban, Flow and Cadence. Karl Scotland focuses on three very important aspects of Lean: Kanban — Controlled Work, Flow — Effective Work, Cadence — Reliable Work.

TargetProcess Tip: Dependencies Management

Generally, formal tracking of dependencies is not needed in agile projects. But in some cases you need to see the relations between user stories.

Watch Dependencies Management video.