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I’ve written in a couple of places about how I like to use a task board during Scrum sprints (iterations). The task board shows all the work we’re doing during a sprint. We update it continuously throughout the sprint–if someone thinks of a new task (“Test the snark code on Solaris 8”) she writes a new card and puts it on the wall. Either during or before the daily scrum, estimates are changed (up or down) and cards are moved around the board.

Generically, the task board looks like this:

A generic task board. Click to enlarge.

he problem is that burndown charts lack two essential pieces of information. First, how much work was actually accomplished during a given iteration (as opposed to how much work remains to be completed) and second how much total work the project contains (or if you prefer how much scope has increased each iteration). A burnup chart for the exact project above might look like this:

We can now clearly see that the team did not take a breather in iteration six. They continued to complete about ten points per iteration, but during the sixth iteration the scope increased by about twenty points.

One could imagine the opposite happening as well. Later in the project the team might delete old user stories that were envisioned during project inception and thus decrease the total scope. The burndown chart would incorrectly show such a scenario as a sudden increase in velocity.

The burndown charts shown here are release charts, where each data point captures the points remaining at the end of each iteration for an entire release. I agree that burnup charts are useful for tracking progress across the release, but I don't think they are appropriate for tracking progress within an iteration (or Sprint, in Scrum terms).

Iteration burndowns are ideal for providing daily feedback to the team for the purpose of deciding whether to reduce scope, add scope, or abandon the iteration entirely. In Scrum, success of the iteration is of utmost importance; the entire Scrum process relies on regular, predicable, and demo-able results at the end of each fixed-length iteration.

So don't throw away those iteration burndowns!

f investors simply are boosting ownership of emerging-markets stocks from very low levels, that's a good thing, investment strategists say. As emerging nations become more affluent, their stocks will move more independently of markets elsewhere.

But there's a potential downside. "Our concern is that when you have this much money moving this quickly, there are growing risks of asset bubbles," says S&P international-equity strategist Alec Young.

Barbara Patterson then goes one step further and offers a counterpoint to the limitless horizons of creative play, namely, daily routine. Where creative play enables a child to comprehend, practice, and master the full breadth of human experience, daily routine offers children security and assurance that the world is a purposeful, meaningful place to live in while at the same time guiding our children toward becoming both responsive and responsible to the needs of society and the Earth. As Patterson's examples reveal, children who can rely upon meals served at the same time each day, a good nap in the afternoon, and a set bedtime complete with a ritual of stories, verses, or prayers grow secure and firm in their bodies and emotions. They also experience that there are times when we humans are called upon to leave the limitless possibilities of self-expression and serve the needs of both others and ourselves. Beyond the Rainbow Bridge is unique in its presentation of creative play and daily routine as the in-breath and out-breath of human life.

Rainbow Bridge is filled with many other perspectives that offer an invigorating and successful approach to the quandaries of childrearing. Readers are introduced to the lifelong significance of keeping a child warm. Here Patterson has invited Andrea Rentea, M.D., an alternative medicine practitioner, to give parents and teachers a fuller explanation of why young children need to be kept warm. Hint: it's not just because they might catch cold, though that is certainly a possibility. The longer-term reasons have, on the one hand, to do with offering the best possibility of developing efficient and healthy metabolic, respiratory, and nervous systems by not placing undue stress on children's bodies too early. On the other hand, keeping a child warm has another equally profound outcome - it can help prevent the adult phenomenon of being so "shut down" that the child-become-adult can no longer sense her body's signals that an adjustment in diet, clothing, etc. is needed.

Let’s go over what we have discovered in these 4  sections.  Firstly we learnt the  identity of the constraint or scarce resource when we couldn’t meet our  aspirations to sell all the market demand.   Such accidental acquaintance with a constraint isn’t so unusual  either.  Then we learnt how to best  exploit the current situation by ensuring that we produced the maximum  throughput per unit time on our scarce resource.  Next we elevated the scarce resource a  little by some incremental capital investment and our profit rose  substantially.  We also had to  subordinate one of the non-constraint resources at the same time in order to  do this.  Finally we set out in search  of additional market and additional capacity.   We found that breaking a previous constraint can have important  ramifications on our future decisions.   However once we aligned those decisions with our experience in  maximizing throughput we once again surprised ourselves with the increase in  output that could be achieved.

The objective is to turn that knowledge into  effective implementation in real life.   The process is the same and the results just as effective as we shall  see

So what's the secret? Cast your mind back to the science lab at school. During chemistry  lessons we learned (and have probably since forgotten) that a multi-phase reaction happens  at the rate of the slowest step. The way to speed up a reaction is to use a catalyst. The  catalyst will work on the slowest step, speeding it up and thus speeding up the whole reaction.  

 We also know a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Take, for example, making the  morning tea. Successful completion of the task depends on our ability to carry out a series  of steps in the correct sequence. We cannot pour the tea until it has been made, we cannot  pour the water into the teapot until it has boiled. We cannot have boiling water until we  have filled the kettle and turned it on.   

 The person who first saw the similarity between a chemical reaction, making a cup of tea and  the systems within an organisation was management consultant Eli Goldratt. He used these  links to create a way of thinking which he called the theory of constraints