Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
For Agile developers only familiar with Scrum or XP, it may be unclear how Lean relates to what they do. This article introduces Lean Thinking and how it enhances software development. Ning Lu of ThoughtWorks China identified the biggest obstacle to Lean or Agile as the mind-set developed during the period of large-scale manufacturing.
Adopting agile is not easy. Many organizations often struggle trying to squeeze the practices of Scrum or XP into the way they work. Mike Cottmeyer offers a reminder to such organizations that placing too much value in the "how" of agile may be a misguided approach.
While Scott Ambler, Ross Pettit and others continue to pursue the creation of a maturity model for agile, David Starr has looked at how and why an organization might want to measure things like: agility, craftsmanship, and organizational success. He found craftsmanship relatively easy to measure, while agility was the most difficult to measure in a useful way.
Promoting, sustaining, and evolving agile practices in an organization requires expertise and experience. Initially, many companies bring in outside experts to help get things started. Laura Moore has described a model, based on the Blue Angels, which companies can use to develop and deploy internal experts.
Backlogs have been under criticism for some time now. Mary Poppendieck goes to the extent of suggesting that product backlog should be eliminated if it is not satisfying the desired purpose. On similar lines Jeff Patton suggested using story maps instead of flat backlogs which help focus on the system being developed.
The discussion of applying lean principles to software development has largely focused on identifying and eliminating waste (in Japanese: muda). Lean Thinking equally aims to remove overburden (muri) and unnecessary variation (mura). Roman Pichler discusses the relationship of the "three M's" and proposes to eliminate overburden as the first step toward a leaner process.
The 'Retrospective Prime Directive' is a practice used by many teams as part of their continuous improvement cycle. As outlined in Norm Kerth's book, it is intended to foster the deep learning that is the heart of a retrospective. This article is an enlightening conversation, captured by Linda Rising, between senior practitioners on the benefits and the challenges of using this practice.
In this InfoQ article Kenji Hiranabe applies lessons learned while working with Japanese manufacturers. While many Agile teams are optimizing only a portion of the value stream, Hiranabe proposes a simple way to adapt lessons from Lean Manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking system to make process visible to more of the organization, for better communication and process improvement.
When Agile teams get stuck in the just-average Norming stage, rather than continuting to the exciting, high Performing stage of teamwork, sometimes they're suffering from an invisible "learning bottleneck" that stunts team performance. Agile practices require us to take time to reflect and learn - and a team that learns quickly succeeds.
