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Embracing Kanban: An Experience Report Early in 2004, Chris Shinkle's company began adopting agile practices. Unfortunately, agile did not have the desired cultural impact within their organization-and the adoption floundered. Several years later, Chris found himself coaching a fellow project lead several months into a difficult project. The project team had experienced developers, but faced a seemingly impossible deadline. Discontent and frustration were rampant and something needed to change. Chris decided that a Kanban implementation could improve the situation. The team quickly discovered the primary reason for their long lead times-a huge Work In Progress (WIP) count. As the team sought to reduce its WIP using Lean principles, they eliminated considerable waste in their processes, reduced bottlenecks, and made significant process improvements. In a short six months, they moved from chaos to a state of continuous improvement.
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Chris Shinkle, SEP INC
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Kanban: A True Integration of Lean and Agile If XP and Scrum are the first generation of agile methods, Kanban software development is the next generation. Kanban integrates lean and agile principles to create better software faster and at less cost. Kanban does this by defining explicit methods to manage work flow, paying particular attention to the number of things being worked on simultaneously, and how the available resources are allocated. Alan Shalloway reviews the basic Lean Principles of “fast, flexible, and flow” along with the systemic nature of errors Kanban addresses. Alan describes the differences between time-boxed software methods such as Scrum and flow-based methods such as Kanban-and when you would want to use Kanban instead of Scrum. Learn how to implement Kanban by defining a workflow, managing your work in progress, and establishing a Kanban board to make the workflow and progress visible.
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Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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Applying Lean Production to Software Development: A Worldview Lean production has made it possible for many industries to develop products faster and more profitably, building a loyal customer base while lowering business risk. Now, Lean has proven it can do the same for software development-and do so better than any development approach to date. Lean is more than a management system, method, tool, or environment; the areas where software methodologies normally focus. Lean is a worldview-a way of thinking that fundamentally changes and humanizes industry. The power of Lean is in the goals it leads us to pursue and the ways in which we coordinate our work. Therefore, Lean allows us to continue using many of our current software techniques. James Sutton returns to the beginnings of Lean, as conceived in the mind of W. Edwards Deming, and moves forward in time to compare and contrast Lean with agile development.
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James Sutton, Lockheed Martin
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Attacking Waste in Software: Three Practices We Must Embrace Now One of the seven principles of Lean Thinking is "eliminate waste." Eliminating waste means minimizing the cost of the resources we use to deliver software to our stakeholders. Jean Tabaka proposes three pivotal practices that we must embrace to aggressively attack waste in software delivery—Software as a Service (SaaS), Community, and Fast Feature Throughput. SaaS eliminates waste by deploying software-based services without the cost inherent in traditional software delivery—materials, shipping, time delay, and more. Community involves stakeholders working together to create products rather than competing among themselves for limited resources. Community eliminates waste by democratizing software development to obviate the need for multiple systems with the same functionality. Fast Feature Throughput refers to development methods that embrace change and quickly deliver value to customers.
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Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development
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Testing Inside the Box These days, we hear a lot about unit testing, testing for programmers, test-first programming, and the like. Design techniques for such tests and for improving system testing are often called white box test designs. Join Rex Black as he explains the basics of white box testing and compares
white box with other types of testing. Find out how the metaphor of "boxes" can inform-and confuse-us. Rex discusses the basis path tests, including cyclomatic number as a measure of complexity and a way to determine the number of tests necessary to cover all paths. He walks
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Rex Black, Rex Black Consulting
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