Tag: lean software
Management Books
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Rework:
by
Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
Great book by the founders of 37 signals on how to get to work and avoid the distractions of bad management practices. Take a new look at how to work without the outdated traditions.
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Agile Estimating and Planning:
by
Mike Cohn
Highlights include:
- Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works
- How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days—and when to use each
- How and when to re-prioritize
- How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones
Management Articles
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Lean Programming - part 2 of 2
by
Mary Poppendieck
"Total Quality Management still rings true for software." Not a perfect representation of Deming's ideas (in our opinion) but an example of Deming's ideas continuing to spark interest.
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Lean coding
by
Jack Ganssle
"Lean manufacturing and the quality movement showed that defects indicate a problem with the process rather than the product. Clearly, if we can minimize waste the system will be delivered faster and with higher quality...
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Kanban Systems
by
James Shore
"In the field, I've seen Kanban work best in chaotic environments where upcoming features don't have much in common. I don't think it's a coincidence that the initial examples of Kanban come from those sorts of environments. David Anderson's team was...
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IT the Toyota way
"The IT department is also building a custom dealer management system to help dealers introduce the principles of the Toyota Way into their own workplaces. It's looking internally at its own processes; instead of the waterfall approach to development -- where a lot of planning and building of solutions is done up front and then given to the customer -- Toyota has adopted an agile process."
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Thoughts on how Kanban Differs from Scrum
by
David Anderson
"Kanban uses the WIP limit as its control mechanism to provoke conversations about change. Failure to respect the WIP limits and discuss problems will lead to stagnation and a failure to improve. Improvement discussions are objective as the visualization, measurement, explicitness of policies and the models from Lean, Theory of Constraints and the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, allow a team to scientifically analyze their problems and propose solutions."
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A Fun Presentation on a Powerful Software Test Design Approach
by
Justin Hunter
"My own consistent experiences and formal studies indicate that pairwise, orthogonal array-based, and combinatorial test design approaches often lead to a doubling of tester productivity (as measured in defects found per tester hour) as compared to the far more prevalent practice in the software testing industry of selecting and documenting test cases by hand."
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Summing it all up
by
Hemal Kuntawala
"So testers, to summarise, if you have a 'QA' column on your task wall, you’re doing it wrong. Go pair with a developer, now. Don’t just wait to bat back a list of bugs to them, go help them avoid having to work on the same thing twice.
...
Ask which scenarios are important and forget about the ridiculous edge cases for now. Now build it and get real feedback."
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Approaching a Minimum Viable Product
"The purpose of the MVP is to answer your most pressing question, to validate your most pressing business assumption. To create an MVP work backwards from your question, not forwards from a feature list. Invest as little as possible to answer the question because after this there will be another question and another and you'll need enough money to answer them all."
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It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings
by
Jason Yip
"It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity.
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Post raised obstacles to an Improvement Board. This is a publicly visible whiteboard or chart that identifies raised obstacles and tracks the progress of their resolution. An Improvement Board can be updated outside of stand-ups and serves as a more immediate and perhaps less confronting way to initially raise obstacles."
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How an automotive secret can make for better software
by
David Anderson
"Kanban is still in the very early stages of adoption. It is true that most people in the software industry have never heard of it. However, there are many hundreds of companies on 5 continents already doing it. Some have very large, successful and well documented implementations. Firms such as the BBC in London, Globo and Petrobras in Brazil, Amdocs in Israel, Vanguard is a well known American adopter."
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How an automotive secret can make for better software
by
David Anderson
"Kanban is a way of visualizing invisible knowledge work activities such as software development, and limiting the quantity of work in progress. Limiting work-in-progress has several benefits: by avoiding over-burdening, quality is often significantly higher, while workers are happier and better motivated; delivery times are usually significantly shorter and far more predictable; priorities are often clear and prioritization decisions are simplified...
Deming’s work is core to everything we do. I think his book, The New Economics, is a seminal work in management thinking... If I could have coffee with just one of these process and management science pioneers it would be Deming."
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Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed
by
John Hunter
"The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A
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Kanban for Skeptics
by
Nick Oostvogels
"WIP limits will reveal bottlenecks quickly and create momentum to help others and start the continuous improvement cycle. The power of continuous improvement in Kanban will help you improve flow"
Management Web Sites and Resources
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Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles
by
John Hunter
Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.
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Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog
by
John Hunter
Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...
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Visual Management Blog
Blog by Xavier Quesada Allue, from Argentina. The goal of the blog is to create a space for the discussion of ideas and examples of Visual Management (the practice of using information visualization techniques to manage work) applied to agile teams and agile project management.
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Kanban Chronicle
Purpose:
To provide insight by sharing our experiences in adopting Kanban.
Why:
When we started, we found that the real examples were the most useful.
We would like to add to that body of knowledge.
We also wanted to share with our colleagues at work.
Our aim:
To provide a full lifecycle example from as many perspectives as possible...
Why did we choose Kanban, what we read first, what we started with, how we adapted, what worked.
by Andrew Walker
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Lean Simulations
"The focus of this site is Lean training material, ready-to-use and free. I am searching the web for lean simulations, lean games, presentations, and real world examples. Please feel free to email me your material and I will link to it or post it."
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Hemal, Developer in Test
by
Hemal Kuntawala
"I'm a test-developer enhancing testing practices using kanban and lean principles.
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I'm keen to see more development teams, agile-adopters or not, move away from the end-of-cycle testing model and embrace true quality assurance by testing throughout the production line."
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Benjamin Mitchell's Blog
by
Benjamin Mitchell
"I'm a London-based independent consulting focussed on Systems Thinking, Intervention Theory and Lean / Kanban applied to IT businesses. I am a follower of Ohno, Deming, Seddon and Argyris."
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Agile consulting
Insights on Agile, Lean, Kanban, and Flow by Jeff Anderson and Alexis Hui.