InfoQ Homepage Lean Content on InfoQ
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Agile Games for Learning
At Agile 2008, Don McGreal and Michael McCullough ran a session that showed how to use games and exercises to help improve our understanding of Agile principles and practices. After the conference they created the Tasty Cupcakes as a repository for all Agile games.
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Questioning Servant Leadership
Is the role of an agile manager only that of servant leader? Should they ever use traditional command and control tools? Should the agile manager ever wield authority and make demands of the team? Should they ever make changes in the membership?
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Fowler: Agile Vs. Lean Misses the Point
In a recent blog post, Martin Fowler explains how the question "Should I use Lean software development instead of Agile?" is based on a false premise. Agile and lean are so deeply interwoven that if you are doing agile you are doing lean, and vice-versa. Those considering process change will likely find the description of the interrelatedness interesting and enlightening.
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Presentation: Future Directions for Agile
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, David Anderson talks about the history of Agile, the current status of it and his vision for the future. The role of Agile does not stand in just having a practice, but in finding ways to implement the principles contained by the Agile Manifesto.
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Scrum-ban Paper Adds Kanban to Scrum
Corey Ladas has written an interesting paper titled "Scrum-ban" in which he describes how a Scrum team might introduce the lean practice of kanban. He goes on to describe an evolutionary process, which if taken far enough, replaces most of Scrum. Even for those who don't want to scrap Scrum and go lean, the paper provides a useful view into what kanban is and how it can augment Scrum.
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Death of Hybrid Camry Chief Engineer is Ruled Overwork
Last month the Japanese labor board ruled that the death of the Chief Engineer on the Camry Hybrid project was ‘karoshi’ (death by over work). This story raised a number of interesting issues about what we can learn from Toyota, sustainable effort and why we develop software.
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An Introduction to Lean Thinking
Lean software development, which we hear a lot about these days, may be still a bit of a mystery for people who come to Agile via Scrum or XP. Earlier this year, at an Open Party was sponsored by InfoQ China, Ning Lu of ThoughtWorks China offered an introduction to Lean thinking, and said the biggest obstacle to Lean thinking can be the manufacturing mindset.
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Traceability Matrix in an Agile Project
The relevance of a traceability matrix is to easily perform impact analysis to a changed requirement.However, does a traceability matrix have a place in an Agile project? The post looks at various view points across blogs and mail groups to find a solution.
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Impediments To Your Value-Stream
Scrum defines an impediment as "anything keeping the team from being more productive" and clearly stresses that teams establish means to remove them as continuously as possible. Joe Little proposes an impediment's scope may be better established as being anything keeping the organization from delivering value.
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Lessons for the Agile Community from 8aweek
InfoQ recently had the opportunity to ask 8aweek co-founders Dave Fowler and Zachary Garbow some questions about how they connect with users, prioritize work, and get things done.
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Overburdened Teams are Less Likely to Root Out Waste
Sometimes, management encourages adoption of Agile but fails to help remove the overburden that cripples teams and keeps them in non-productive patterns. In his article, Roman Pichler looks at the "3 M's" of Lean, and how the concept of removing "muri" (overburden) provides help for Agile adoptions, by encouraging teams to give up wishful thinking and commit to their actual capacity.
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Are Iterations/Sprints Waste or Value to Agile Teams?
Although many people consider iteration to be a key characteristic of agile software development, some question whether or not they're important, and add value to an agile method, or if they're superfluous, or even wasteful. InfoQ has assembled a roundup of arguments on the subject, to help agile teams decide if iterations are important for them.
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Agile Kanban: Visual Tracking Beyond the Team Room
In the beginning Agile was largely a developer-driven initiative, sometimes improving development processes only to find the real bottlenecks lay outside developer control. In his latest InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe analyses Lean manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking tool, how it differs from the Agile taskboard, and how it helps identify more far-reaching improvements.
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Opinion: Refactoring is a Necessary Waste
Refactoring is one of the key technical practices in the Agile developer's toolkit. Refactoring also has no measurable customer value by its very definition - it involves changing the structure (design) while maintaining the behavior. In the Lean world - anything that does not have customer value is waste, and a customer only perceives behavior/functionality and not structure.
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Leadership is not Obsolete for Self-Organizing Teams!
In this talk, software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about "the matrix problem", alignment, waste cutting, planning, standards and other topics including the role of measurement: "cash flow thinking" over "balance sheet thinking". InfoQ presents video of this popular talk from the Agile2007 conference.