Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
This presentation has three interwoven parts: an exploration of lean development principles, "as-a-service" deployment models, and the ways in which Spring and SpringSource technologies support this style of development. Numerous demos illustrate the solutions to the issues raised in the discussion.
What did a group of Agilists see when they "went to the gemba" in Japan to observe Lean in action? Here is a roundup of observations from bloggers and newsgroup writers on this spring's "Roots of Lean" tour to Japan, led by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. The tour visited both manufacturing and software organizations, and included Henrik Kniberg, Sune Gynthersen, & Gabrielle Benefield, among others.
In a casual interview, InfoQ got to talk with James Shore about some of the topics he's been most vocal about lately, including his Art Of Agile book, recent waves of watered-down agile, and how Kanban might be less than the whole picture.
Elizabeth Keogh looks at how Kanban and Feature Injection can play into Behaviour Driven Development, to work together to help identify the most important software, reduce unnecessary artifacts at each stage of development, and produce the minimum necessary to achieve a vision.
Scrum and agile methods promote the establishment of a product backlog. Some leaders of the Lean community feel that the product backlog is "waste." This article argues that Lean advocates that see backlogs only as "an inventory" of things to be done are making the classic mistake of viewing software development as a production process. Backlogs are fundamental to Agility.
Durnall and Parkinson provide a thorough introduction to Lean principles, the idea of "Lean Thinking," and the application of those ideas to software development. IT is viewed as a system, a process, as well as a series of production steps and the presenters show how Lean ideas apply to and can improve each aspect.
David Anderson presents a brief history of the kanban system through case study reports from teams at Microsoft and Corbis. Kanban acts to limit work-in-progress and focus the team on achieving a continuous flow of value to the customer and innovates on accepted agile management practices by providing an iteration-less process with a regular release cadence.
Robin Dymond gives an overview of Lean, how it can help take Agile to the 'next level' and why organizations that fail to change will not have successful Agile teams. Robin describes an organizational mismatch between traditional hierarchies and team structures. He believes that organizations will need to reorganize around teams to get the most out of Agile.
Lean software gurus Mary and Tom Poppendieck share their years of practical experience, as they speak on the history of Lean thinking, the value of fast delivery and deferred committment, their use of Value Stream Mapping to identify and reduce waste, the importance of identifying and dealing well with cross-organizational and inter-organizational boundaries, and how Lean relates to RUP and Scrum.
