At Planeto we’re big fans of lean and agile software development. Our philosophy is very simple and iterative: let’s design new features quickly (just-in-time design), implement a first version, see how it works (e.g. get feedback from our players), redesign, and implement again.
Since we started the company we’ve tried to tweak the Scrum development process to fit our needs: weekly sprints, feature backlog, user stories, burndown charts, and whatnot. However, although Scrum is considered a very agile, low-overhead methodology, we still consistently found ourselves spending too much time adhering to the Scrum principles instead of just getting things done.
With our iterative design principle, very short sprints (one a week), and goal to deploy live after every sprint, even Scrum has not been agile enough for us. And we realized that neither time boxing nor progress forecasting (both features of Scrum) were that important for us.
Last week we decided to try the Kanban methodology and this Monday we re-tweaked our brains and are now all happy Kanban’ists. (For those with a deeper interest in development methodologies, we can highly recommend reading Kanban vs Scrum.)
The first version of our Kanban board
It’s only been a few days, but it already feels very liberating. Our goal is now not to complete sprints every week, but rather to get a continuous development flow going. And then deploy live regularly (hopefully every week) once we have new features to introduce to our players.
There is no weekly start-and-stop of sprints, just a nice continuous development flow. Feeeeels gooood..
We’ll let you know how it goes! 