KABI - FAQ

Do you think KABI would work for self-organized teams?

I believe KABI is one of the best methodologies for self-organized teams. As every team member takes responsibility to ensure KABI works there is no one-man show like in the case of Scrum where Scrum master has to ensure that the processes are followed by the team.

Can KABI be used for non BI project?

I believe KABI can be used for any software project where progress can be visualized on daily basis.

Why do we have weekly status reporting and not any other frequency of reporting?

In a project with lots of unknowns, dependencies, unpredictable work load and team members have to support additional topics on unplanned basis, there is no point in having monthly or quarterly plans and reporting because by the time a month is passed plans may change.

The daily reviews, it looks like there is micromanagement, isn’t it?

Actually, there is no management. Team is only reviewing the product as part of the daily demo and not the person.

Does DDAS add unnecessary pressure on the team members?

For a team member who actually works there is no pressure. In fact he will be eager to share his previous days' achievements. But for a slacker, definitely yes, the “Peer Inspiration” will change to “Peer Pressure”. If you want to work to the best of your potential, with least administrative overhead, welcome to KABI.

Does KABI work when team members are not at the same level of expertise?

I believe that KABI works better than any other known methodology in this scenario. DDAS also helps team members at lower level of expertise to gain knowledge on daily basis from team members at higher level of expertise.

In KABI, as team members “pull” work, how does it ensure they pull enough work?

In KABI core values of peer inspiration, mutual trust and exemplary way of working ensures that every team member works to their full potential. Slackers wouldn’t be able to hang on for a long time as it would be clearly visible during DDAS that they haven’t been working enough. Either they will eventually move out or team has to ensure that non-performers are moved out which would then make the team even better. In this way KABI also ensures to retain a great team and get rid of non-performers. Team members are expected to perform at their best every single day.

Do requirements have to be in user story format?

No not at all.  A requirement can be a user story or a task or any other type. Most important point is that the requirement is written in such a manner that it results into a deliverable and acceptance criteria is clearly stated. It should be possible to break the requirement into sub-tasks if the requirement takes more than a day to implement.

Which tool did you use for KABI board?

We configured Atlassian’s Kanban board. We created two boards; a high level KABI board and a detailed level KABI board. High level board is at user story level and detailed board is at sub-task level. This way to check the “To-Do” and "Inprogress" user stories we just need to check a smaller board (High level) and to see the details of  sub-task progress for the User Stories in progress we could see it in the detailed board.

Did the JIRA ticket have only two statuses?

No, they have many statuses like new, planning, implementation, review, testing, completed and closed. We mapped new to "To-Do" and everything between new and closed to "In-progress" in the KABI board.

Which tools did we use in our project?

Mainly MicroStrategy (BI reporting and analytics tool), Pentaho Data Integration (ETL tool), Oracle database, Confluence, Sharepoint, JIRA, Mercurial, Jenkins and SOAP UI. 

For the post on  KABI refer - KABI - New Agile Methodology for BI