This year, the 8th edition of the XP Days Benelux takes place on November 25-26th 2010.  The location is Kapellerput in Heeze (The Netherlands).

Together with my colleague Peter Doomen, I'm selected as a speaker.  The session we are going to deliver is the Frog Factory. Read more about this session here and here.

All the info about the XpDays can be found here.

May we have your vote please? Together with 3 colleagues, I participate on the PMI Agile contest on YouTube. Have a look at our presentation Agile @ SD Worx YannicHelsen and give us your vote! How to? Sign in on YouTube, become a member of the PMIAgile group on http://lnkd.in/BpXYNP  , click on our video (“Agile @ SDWorx” YannicHelsen) and vote for use by clicking I love it! Tnx in advance!

This is the video:

Mattias Skarin aka Crisp posted a nice small article with a case study about a team that is transformed from Scrum to Kanban.  He also put a few things he learned from this process, but also mentioned that they still have a way to go.

So if you are interested in this, read it here: http://blog.crisp.se/mattiasskarin/2010/04/27/1272362964756.html

Yesterday evening, my work hosted an event for the Belgium Agile Usergroup.  The main stream of this is evening was "Using Kanban Beyond Software Development".  Together with 2 colleagues (Peter Doomen and Sofie) I was one of the presenters.

There were 3 presentations and one open space:

1. Kanban in a complex administrative world (Sofie)
2. Kanban for support of development teams (Sven)
3. Kitchen Kanban - Cooking 13 different plates for 1600 people with Kanban (Peter)
4. Kanban is better than Scrum because... (Open discussion)

Afterwards we had a small break out session with following topics:

1. Discuss the result of the Open Discussion
2. Presentation of the Kanban Game
3. Evaluation: What did we learn today?

In total, we had 4 time slots (of 20 minutes).  Each presentator has given his presentation twice in one of the timeslots, so he could follow one of the other sessions.

It was a no slide presentation, but we made one A0 poster for each presenter. Here's my poster

As promised in my previous post about the Kanban Experience, now all the info about the game with played.

You can find everything on the blog of colleague Peter Doomen. In this article he explained the game and offers everything as a free download (read the rules for downloading it). So go here and enjoy: http://www.aboriginemundi.com/index.php/2010/04/the-frog-factory-a-kanban-experience-game/.

If you have feedback to the game, you can always contact me or Peter.  So we hope you enjoy it and can give us some great feedback.

Yesterday, I gave a two hour introduction about Kanban together with a colleague of me (Peter Doomen).  We had a group of 9 people, not only IT people, but also a few from the business itself.

The introduction to Kanban was in a game format: The Frog Factory.  During and after this game there was time to do some groups discussions.  At the end we gave a short theoretical overview about Kanban.

During the discussions, it was clear that the problems they had during the game, were a good reflection of what they encountered during there daily job.

More about the game and a few pictures later.

A nice article about Kanban for managers.  Read it here: http://www.kanbandistilled.com/

You always want to know what the ScrumMaster is doing in your team/company?  Well now it's the time you will find out.  Scrum Alliance has posted a nice article with the task of a SM.  Little remark, this list varies per company. So read it here: http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/160-what-does-a-scrummaster-do.

You want to use Kanban or you are already using it.  But you also have used Scrum or know Scrum.  Both are the buzz words at this moment in the Agile world.  But still you don't know which one is the best in common or the best for you?  Are they related to each other? Could you easily adapt both together?  Is it easy to make a switch form one to the other?

Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin from InfoQ have writen a book to clear this fog for you.  the book includes following chapters:

• Kanban and Scrum in a nutshell
• Comparison of Kanban and Scrum and other Agile methods
• Practical examples and pitfalls
• Cartoons and diagrams illustrating day-to-day work
• Detailed case study of a Kanban implementation within a Scrum organization

You can download it for free or buy the paper book.  Read everything here: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/kanban-scrum-minibook.

A little psychology.  Michael Dubakov has wrote a nice blog post about saying no when using Kanban.  especially for your WIP limit.  Read it here : http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/2009/12/kanban-psychology-can-you-say-no.html

I must say, a difficult question, as both methodologies have a different audience and way of use.  Although Kanban is of the same family as Scrum.  in fact, in my opninion it's a light weight Scrum with a more dynamic area.  I'm going to setup Kanban for our team here after my holiday (somewhere around mid november).

But about our question, Doug Shimp has wrote a nice blog article about it.  You can read it here: http://doug-shimp.net/scrum-faq/will-kanban-replace-scrum/