Friday, June 22, 2012

Yellow Squad Weekly Retrospective Minutes: June 22

Introduction

What is this post?

I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads.  We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies.  Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it.  We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep track of on a wiki.  This post contains the minutes of one of those meetings.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Our checklist for running a daily meeting with kanban

The squad I manage is fully distributed, like most of Canonical's employees.  We are all in relatively overlapping timezones--ranging from Italy to the American east coast--but none of us work in the same building, or even the same city.

We also are on the Lean journey.  We're not nearly as far along as others you'll find blogging on the web.  However, maybe we're interesting because of the combination: lean, plus a distributed workforce.

I suspect that working in a distributed team increases the importance of good practices.  When they are not followed, the pain is more intense.  For example, I think that writing everything down is important for running a business well; but it is essential, or more obviously essential, for a fully distributed team.

Another good practice like this is a daily meeting.  We've done this for many years now, and it is essential to our coordination.  We combine it with an online kanban board, which is central to our daily workflow and coordination.

We've also recently combined it with another good idea, checklists, and that's what I want to share right now.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Yellow Squad Weekly Retrospective Minutes: June 15

Introduction

What is this post?

I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads.  We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies.  Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it.  We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep track of on a wiki.  This post contains the minutes of one of those meetings.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Yellow Squad Weekly Retrospective Minutes: June 8, 2012


Introduction

What is this post?

I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads.  We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies.  Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it.  We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep track of on a wiki.  This post contains the minutes of one of those meetings.

Why read it?

The point of the meeting, and of these minutes, is to share and learn.  We'd be happy if you do both of those.  You might be interested in our technical topics, or in the problems we encounter, in the process change that we try to follow based on our successes and failures.

What are we working on right now?

Our current project is applying LXC virtualization to the 5+ hour test suite of the Launchpad web application.  By parallelizing the test suite across lightweight virtual machines on the same box, we've gotten the time down to under 40 minutes.  That's still not ideal, but it is a whole lot better.

Now read the minutes!

Friday, June 1, 2012

Yellow Squad Weekly Retrospective Minutes: June 1, 2012

Introduction

What is this post?

I'm the lead for the "Yellow" squad in Canonical's collection of geographically distributed, agile squads.  We're directed to work as needed on various web and cloud projects and technologies.  Every Friday, our squad has a call to review what happened in the past week and see what we can learn from it.  We follow a simple, evolving format that we keep track of on a wiki.  This post contains the minutes of one of those meetings.

Why read it?

The point of the meeting, and of these minutes, is to share and learn.  We'd be happy if you do both of those.  You might be interested in our technical topics, or in the problems we encounter, in the process change that we try to follow based on our successes and failures.

What are we working on right now?

Our current project is applying LXC virtualization to the 5+ hour test suite of the Launchpad web application.  By parallelizing the test suite across lightweight virtual machines on the same box, we've gotten the time down to under 40 minutes.  That's still not ideal, but it is a whole lot better.

Now read the minutes!