Dean Leffingwell has a great post up with the above title. His approach and conclusions fit well with my Laws of Agile. Here’s a summary from Dean’s great work which is very practical: He offers that by replacing the word ‘software’ with ‘solutions’ in founding agile principle statements, they can apply broadly to other knowledge …
Continue reading "Ten Practices for Applying Lean Agile to Other Knowledge Work"
David Anderson at Agile Management has two new blog posts that got me thinking. The first is How to Start with Kanban which lays out how to implement Kanban for software development in 10 easy steps (I like its simplicity.) The second is Blogosphere Buzz about Lean & Kanban which is a comprehensive review of …
David Anderson thoughts on Kanban from Agile 2007 summarizes his approach in 4 bullet points for success: Focus on Quality (fourth law of development) Reduce or Limit Work in Progress (what's wrong with pushing) Balance Demand against Throughput (first law of development) Prioritize I think these simple statements help focus on how the principles of …
This post continues the Laws of Development Physics as related to people elements that impact development.
"...when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in thought advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be." - Lord Kelvin “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that …
Continue reading "People Laws (part 1) 6th Law = Optimize the System"
To follow up on the fourth law, I add as reinforcement the fifth law of agile physics: If you cannot pay for variability reduction, you will pay in one or more of the following ways: Long iteration times and high story points in progress Wasted capacity or need for more resources Slower burn down rates …
Variability is the root of all evil in development and must be eliminated.
Stories are the raw materials of development. They should stay in a raw form until needed. Or, as stated by the third “law of development physics”: The value of requirements increases as its production release becomes imminent. Or, you know what you need when you see it, until then, make up a good story.
In my post, What’s so Wrong with Pushing, I showed by analogy how Time Blocked Iterations, Story Points and Burn Down Rate enabled a superior pull mechanism over traditional management for development teams. In this post, I’ll quantify how to maximize results from that pull system. There are three, sometimes opposing objectives in maximizing the …
In agile development, much emphasis is rightfully placed on burn down rate, the number of story points completed within an iteration of development. I’ve never been fully satisfied with explanations for why this measure and control of it is so critical. In reality, burndown is only meaningful when story points are limited in a time-blocked …
