'A Sustained Engineering Release Cycle Using Kanban'

Because of scheduling conflicts for speakers and meeting places, we need to move the meetup to next week. We've also settled on a topic for the meeting, 'A Sustained Engineering Release Cycle Using Kanban.'

For this meeting, I'll discuss how I transitioned a sustained engineering effort from a cyclic, PMBOK-based lifecycle to a Lean cycle using Kanban methodology. Sustained engineering efforts include maintenance and upgrade releases, and typically have short, date-driven cycle times. Traditional software development methodologies don't work well in this environment, and surprisingly, Agile processes such as Scrum can be hard to implement as well. Lean approaches offer a viable alternative, and one that has been empirically proven by several Agile practitioners. In this presentation, I'll discuss the problems we had with the existing process, how we identified requirements for a new process, the initial Kanban process we developed, our implementation strategy, and the results including feedback and process improvement.

This should be a very interesting meetup, and one that is applicable to almost every software development organization.