InfoQ Homepage Lean Content on InfoQ
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Mike Cottmeyer's View Inside The Lean/Kanban Conference
The first organized conference focusing on Lean & Kanban was held in Miami during the first week of May. Mike Cottmeyer was present and used his popular blog 'Leading Agile' to provide a relatively comprehensive play-by-play look into what occurred there.
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Feature Injection Comics
Chris Matts, well known in the Agile community for his work in bringing option theory to software development, has been writing about feature injection in a comic-book format on the Agile Journal. He explains how, by changing the way information flows through your software development process, you can significantly improve performance.
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Comparing Kanban To Scrum
Kanban has been gaining serious interest as a valid approach to implementing agile for your development organization. As such, many people are asking the question "how does Kanban compare to Scrum?". Henrik Kniberg has taken a stab at answering this question
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Recommended Lean Books
Are you interested in reading up on Lean theory? The latest discussion on the leanagile Yahoo! group lists many good reads and even a work-in-progress.
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Lean 'Standard Work' Applied to Software Development
One component of the Toyota Production System is the concept of standard (or standardized) work. A recent post on the Kanban Development list asked if this concept carries over when TPS and lean are applied to software projects. Despite the fact that software development is not manufacturing, respondents did find value in applying the 'standard work' concept to development.
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Interview with Robin Dymond at Agile 2008
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.
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Are Kanban Workflows Agile?
Karl Scotland started a discussion examining whether the workflows or stages in a kanban system are counter to the agile ideals of cross-functional and collaborative teams. He started by noting that the stages on a kanban board can look a lot like the phases of waterfall. The ensuing discussion clarified that stages are not necessarily hand-offs, and led to other insights as well.
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Presentation: A Kanban System for Software Engineering
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.
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Use Cases Considered Valuable (but Optional) For Lean/Agile Requirements Capture
Dean Leffingwell, author of Scaling Software Agility and Chief Product Methodologist at Rally, has concluded that Use Cases can be a valuable tool to model requirements for a large-scale Lean/Agile Project. Use cases are not commonly encountered in Lean/Agile (especially XP and Scrum), where stories are the requirements gathering tool of choice.
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Article: Lean and Agile, Marriage Made in Heaven or Oxymoron?
Dave West takes a look at the world views of the Agile and Lean communities and finds them in conflict. If true, then many of us in the community blending Lean and Agile and unaware of the inherent clash in ideals could be making some big mistakes. As an example of a manifestation of this conflict Dave takes the backlog.
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First Kanban Conference
First annual Lean Kanban Process and Practices will be held in Miami, Florida, May 6-8th and featuring keynotes from Dean Leffingwell, Alan Shalloway and David Anderson. The other speakers include most of the players in Kanban movement (Corey Ladas, Karl Scotland, Eric Landes et al.).
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Managing Change Requests in Scrum
Tracking change requests in Agile is often associated with being at odds with the Agile principle of "Responding to change over following a plan". However, in certain situations it might be necessary to track change requests. An interesting discussion on the Lean Agile Scrum group tries to look deeper into the 'Why' and 'How' of tracking change requests.
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Scrum of Scrums - Issues and Value
The Scrum of Scrums meeting "is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration." Allan Shalloway asked for people's experience "on Scrum-of-Scrums for coordinating teams vs scaling Scrum to the enterprise" he sees problems in with large groups (350 people).
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Presentation: Principles and Practices of Lean-Agile Software Development
In this presentation held during Agile 2008, Alan Shalloway, CEO and founder of Net Objectives, presents the Lean software development principles and practices and how they can benefit to Agile practitioners.
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Kanban as Alternative Agile Implementation
Kanban systems for software, derived from the Toyota Production System, are an iterationless approach for scheduling work. Instead of using a time boxed iteration and planning meeting, the pulls stories from the backlog only when it has completed its previous work. Dave Nicolette thinks that its important to expand our repertoire beyond the basics become familiar with other tools like Kanban.