Is there an Agile vs Kanban vs Waterfall course?

Caleb;

It is my understanding that Treehouse is in the production process for at least one workshop/course on this topic. I haven't heard of an update on it recently however.

I would be interested to read about your experience (pros & cons) with the agile process in your current position and what some of the obstacles to production your company is hoping to resolve by switching to a Kanban model. What pros and cons you see with doing so, etc.

Thanks,

Ken

I would be interested to learn Kanban, so if a course or workshop is available in the near future, I'm definitely looking forward to go through them. Thanks.

It's been a while, since I posted this question, but we've been using Kanban at Ticketmaster for the past few months and finally feel I can give feedback about the new methodology.

SCRUM

Pros

• The 2 week sprint period seem to help people track the status of their work and understand when it needed to be completed
• Daily stand ups are great for constant communications, especially is people are working remote
• SCRUM seem to focus on retrospectives, looking for ways to improve the next sprint.

Cons

• Too many meetings that do not require all developers to be present. Between stand up, sprint review, sprint retro, sprint dry runs, etc you can have days were you are in meetings all day because of the methodology.
  • The two week time period became a problem, because if you had anything blocking you from completing your work, most developers are scrambling last minute to get their code to production which can result in more bugs being created and bigger issues down the line

KANBAN

Pros

• For our team, we use to have our team lead assign stories to each developer, depending on your skill(java, javascript, perl, php, etc) you would get a user story related to your strengths. In Kanban, you take off the top of the que. If the next user story in the que is focus only on Java and you are a JS developer, then you are going to learn java and become a better developer.

• It focuses on being agile for the developer. There is no "deadline" for your work to be completed like scrum. If you need to demo Monday, but its not completed, then you work gets demo in the next one.

Cons

• not as structured as SCRUM. Depending on your team's discipline and organization, Kanban may not provide enough structure to your team to start producing more through put.

Overall View The first few weeks it was difficult to adjust to a new process, but one thing I noticed about Kanban compared to SCRUM(from a developer perspective) was we simply took out the parts of SCRUM we did not like and called that Kanban. For Product Owners and Project Managers, Kanban is a huge overhaul. For people who code, its can be simpler if you would like.

The best thing about agile methodology is you can be agile in the ways you use them to help make your team perform better.