InfoQ Homepage Lean Content on InfoQ
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Naresh Jain: Dealing with Change in an Evolving Contextual World
Naresh Jain won the Gordan Pask award in 2007. He writes about the need to adapt our processes and build on top of agile practices, one size doesn't fit all and processes must evolve as we tackle more and more complex problems. He examines some of the key elements from the Lean Startup movement and shows how they are the logical next step for many agile implementations.
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What has happened and is happening in Japan’s Agile movement
Kenji Hiranabe is a recipient of the 2008 Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile. He discusses the current state of Agile in Japan, and reflects on the influence that Japanese approaches (such as the Toyota Production System and Lean) have had on the Agile movement. He examines changes happening in the Japanese software industry that is creating an Agile friendly environment.
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The Curse of the Change Control Mechanism
Unprecedented levels of change caused by the pace of innovation are stretching traditional contract models to the breaking point. As more organizations adopt Agile and Lean for the development of innovative/complex products and services, new contract models are needed that accommodate change. The Evolutionary Contract Model, based on Agile / Lean principles, offers promise as a possible solution.
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IT And Architecture: Inside-Out Perspectives
The software industry is in disarray, costs are escalating, and quality is diminishing. Promises of newer technologies and processes and methodologies in IT are still far from materializing on any significant scale. Bruce Laidlaw and Michael Poulin - each with more than 30 years of experience compared notes on the past and present of IT and provide insights on what IT needs to make progress.
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Estimation Toolkit
No matter what kind of software you write, or the size company you work for, you probably have to provide estimates to someone. There are many techniques agile teams can use to help guide their estimation efforts. The toolkit described in this article consists of a number of novel approaches to estimating agile software projects that will help you answer the question – “When will we be done?”.
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Doing Kanban Wrong
Kanban as a tool to support lean software development continues to increase in popularity all the time. However, like countless tools before it, Kanban will be unfairly blamed for many project failures by people who are doing Kanban wrong. This article discusses some ways the author has tried to give Kanban a bad name. Hopefully these examples will keep you from falling into similar traps.
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Use of Kanban in the Operations Team at Spotify
In this article, InfoQ spoke with Mattias Jansson, Operations Engineer at Spotify (an online music streaming service) about the adoption of Kanban by the Spotify Operations team. Jansson offered a lot of detail about the choice to adopt Kanban as well as the experiences that the Operations team at Spotify has gained while implementing a Kanban-based approach to dealing with their workload.
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Agile Lessons from a Management Guru
Deming was one of a select group of thought leaders who have shaped modern management over the last century. He is best known for the impact he had on Japanese businesses with his teachings on design, manufacturing, sales and quality. The first three of Deming's fourteen points are examined in detail in the context of Agile software development.
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The Current Direction of Agile
This article focuses on some of the recent trends within the Agile community by briefly describing some alternatives to today’s well known Agile processes. Particularly focusing on estimation, forecasting deliverables and the increased impact Lean manufacturing has had on the Agile community.
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Pulling Power: A New Software Lifespan
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.
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Lean and Agile: Marriage Made in Heaven or Oxymoron?
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.
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An Introduction to Lean Thinking for Software
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.