Great stories...

If you haven't seen these great blog posts you should check them out:

Lean Team Software Process by Corey Ladas

snippet: An alternate metaphor for software value is a refined substance, like gasoline or ice cream. The raw material is customer requirements, domain knowledge, time, and energy; and this is transformed into manifest behavior of a computing system. This view suggests that software has no more customer value than the sum of the scenarios that it supports. Then there is no bright line that defines “complete”, there is only relatively more or less value delivered. When I fill up at the gas station, I need more than one gallon and less than 100 gallons, and when the pump tells me I have enough, I expect to pay the exact value of the utility I expect to receive from the product. Software can be delivered in this way: keep giving me more until I have enough, then stop and charge me for what I have consumed.

Metrics, Schmetrics II by Matthew @ Creative Chaos

snippet: All of those examples are fungible - a gallon of gas can be traded for any other gallon of gas. A penny saved is a penny earned. They are all the same.

Yet test cases, lines of code, these things are not the same. You can have a test case that takes two hours to set up, or a half-dozen similar ones you can run in thirty seconds.

Scrum vs. Kanban by Mike Cottmeyer (ignore the Idol intro and title at the beginning)

snippet: I think that in some ways Scrum is hitting a wall because some of us think that Scrum is the answer to everything. Is Kanban the new answer to everything? Is it going to replace Scrum and XP or DSDM or AUP or Crystal? I can't even imagine how we can have these conversations without understanding where and when is the best context to apply these principles. I feel like a broken record but there is a time and place for all these techniques.