Tools for agile software development

I'm involved in a couple of projects at the moment, one of those is the website of my wife Ira, who's starting up her own business Mirakel where she's organising workshops for kids.

I'm always looking for ways to make work more simple and more accessible whilst keeping costs at a minimum. I know there are a lot of tools out there, but I thought I'd write up my list of tools - Trello, Google docs and Balsamiq - which work perfectly together and costs are minimal.

Kanban workshop

Yesterday I was lucky to grab a Kanban workshop held by iLean. It was very good course given by Jef Cumps.

We started with a game where we had to "produce" the end product with a team. We had all kind of roles in the team ranging from PO's analysts, devs to testers and the customer. The goal was to produce as much as possible good products (postits  with some colored dots on). In the first iteration we had a huge amount of postits created and ongoing, somewhere around 100. Sadly only 2 were accepted by the customer (darn customer, with his strict acceptance criteria). In a second iteration, we were given Kanban rules with WIP limits and all. The result was amazing, we had far less ongoing things, more accepted and less stress. Nice excercicy :)

Always nice to learn it via an alternative way, had a lot of aha moments. Well done iLean !  

The kanban book

Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin wrote the eBook Kanban and Scrum -making the most of both, its great to read and really helps if you're used to a scrum process. The book really reads smooth and the 120 pages are devoured in a couple of bus rides commuting to work. I like the short chapters and the easy, simple graphics.
Nice work. Seems there's also the Scrum and XP from the trenches from Henrik, sure I'll read that one next and besides the book, Henrik's blog and Mattias's blog are also very interesting reads.