Dan North and Chris Read discuss techniques for implementing Agile Operations, a combination of Lean thinking and Agile development meant to optimize the business processes in order to reduce waste.
Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt, enumerates some practical points on individual procutivity. This article wonders how well these apply to software development and contrasts his list with that of other lists.
Hitting a kanban limit introduces slack into an organization by temporarily stopping the work that feeds into a bottleneck. So how can you convince management that introducing a kanban limit (i.e. stopping work) could actually be a good thing?
JRebel 3.0 was released on April 16th. It targets turnaround time in Java development by removing the need for redeployment. Instead it supports advanced class reloading. The article details updating Java classes at runtime and provides an overview of the technologies used in JRebel and especially the improvements of the recently version 3.0.
TDD and BDD are now widely-used software development techniques. However, solely following TDD & BDD may still lead to missed business opportunities, or worse, a negative impact to the business. Two questions which TDD & BDD are unable to answer are: How do you measure the usage of your application? How do you get feedback from your customers? Is Experiment-Driven Development (EDD) the answer?
A delay, in general, is getting something done later than it was scheduled for thereby causing distress and inconvenience. Likewise, a delay is considered to be a waste in the Agile terminology. A delay causes discontinuity and thereby causes other wastes like relearning, task switching etc. A few Agilists discuss the common delays and ways to resolve them.
Fundamental to Lean Software Development is the pursuit of minimizing waste. The TPS publicized 7 primary wastes of manufacturing, and the Poppendiecks have since translated these wastes to our world of software development. Jack Mulinsky has recently been posting an introductory series on these wastes at agilesoftwaredevelopment.
Hamlet D'Arcy explains the Lean principles - Eliminate Waste, Build Quality In, Create Knowledge, Defer Commitment, Deliver Fast, Respect People, Optimize the Whole – in the context of using Groovy as programming language.
Rolf Russell & Andy Duncan discuss how to have rapid and reliable releases from the perspective of build, release, and devops, considering the relationship between the teams involved, the metrics needed to measure the performance achieved, the required skills, and the need to remove waste and bottlenecks.
Usain Bolt revealed his nutrition sources: KFC, McDonald's & Chinese Food. If the world's fastest man doesn't eat healthy food, why should programmers? Because programmers know about Version Control!
In this interview, Craig Larman discusses the many challenges you face when scaling scrum to large organizations. These challenges stem from decisions to use component teams over feature teams; adopting out sourcing without careful consideration for the impact of that decision; and over specialization of skills and limited learning which leads to waste, bottlenecks, and poor performance.
