We are using quite a set of new an cool methodologies/processes, we have a huge kanban board, If you have never used one, go for it, it’s the best tool for making your project transparent and involve the developers, our activites are embedded in a Scrum process, we work with User Stories and we have the daily Scrum, retrospective, etc… We use the engineering practices from XP, Continuous integration, Pair programming (not always) and we are going to try TDD.

For planning we play planning poker which is a great tool for agreeing on a plan, and we keep control of our schedule with burndown charts.

It is true that we don’t have a plan before hand for the whole project, but I don’t think it’s possible to get a reliable one from Waterfall, we just have estimates and we make sure the customer understand that they will be revised.

In the other hand, this set of principles, processes, make us very productive, the software we deliver is high quality and most of the times we get the result the customer was expecting.

About gathering the maximum input from the customer, completely agree, It’s just how this input is gather which I disagree from a traditional perspective… I believe in continuous deployment and doing demos of releasable software every two weeks having involved the customer as some else from the team, that’s the way you make sure you get the right inputs. Unfortunately that’s not always possible.

Let me as well advance you that my next post I think It’s going to be really interesting to you as it talks about inputs, outputs and actions, I hope it will be ready this week so stay tuned.

Once again, thanks for your feedback!!!