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/

MVP, Jeff Levinson, has created a nice Work item visualization tool (first version).  This tool turns work item relationschip information into some nice DGML graphs.  These graphs can be viewed  in the new architecture visualization tools.

You can find this great tool at codeplex: http://visualization.codeplex.com/. So go there, download it, use it, etst it and give feedback to improve the tool.

Yesterday Microsoft announced the beta release of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 codename “Eaglestone”.  This is an eclipse plug from Teamprise (acquired in November 2009).  Read the whole article on Brian harry's blog : http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2010/03/04/microsoft-visual-studio-team-explorer-2010.aspx

Some announcements about VS2010:

1. MS Visual Studio Test Elements 2010 will be renamed to MS Visual Studio Test Professional 2010
2. MS Test and Lab Manager will be renamed to MS Test Manager 2010
3. MS Visual Studio Team Lab  Management 2010 will be renamed to MS Visual Studio Lab Management 2010
4. Pricing details for VS2010 are release

All this info and a bit more background info can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/slange/archive/2010/01/26/it-s-official-vs-2010-branding-pricing.aspx.

From now on you can follow @Visug on Twitter.  All updates, news and more will also be announced here.

And for those who are interrested: As promotion of their twitter account, they give away a free ticket to the TechDays 2010 (Belgium) away to one of the followers.

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.

After his last great post about the difference between CI and Build Automation tools, Roy Osherove posted the next part about this.  Now he gives us 18 questions to ask when choosing CI and Automated Build tools.  It's a nice list of questions, so read this article http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2010/01/21/18-questions-to-ask-yourself-when-choosing-continuous-integration-and-build-automation-tools.aspx and the next time consider using this list when you have to make a choice.

Roy Osherove has posted a nice article about the difference between Continuous Integration Tools and Automated Build Tools.  Read it here: http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2010/01/14/the-difference-between-continuous-integration-tools-and-automated-build-tools.aspx