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A Failed Opportunity To Coach, Teach, And Help Others Improve

A colleague in the nation of Pablo-The-Donkey asked a question on the LosTechies private mailing list: “Has anyone had experience with bringing agile into a workplace that has legacy code that hurts to touch, let alone wrap tests around and refactor?...

Published Thu, Sep 09 2009 5:09 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban, Education, Coaching

A Kanban Board Is A Production Leveling Task Board

In the lean manufacturing world heijunka - production leveling - “ is a technique for reducing the mura waste and vital to the development of production efficiency […]. The general idea is to produce intermediate goods at a constant rate, to allow further...

Published Wed, Sep 09 2009 8:50 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban, Workflow

Kanban In Time-Boxes: The Cadence of WIP and Sprints

A comment that was left on a previous post , and a response that I made to the comment, got me thinking about Kanban and time boxes such as Sprints or Iterations some more. As I stated in my response, I don’t think time boxes are “not Lean”, at this point...

Published Fri, Aug 08 2009 5:02 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban, Workflow, Productivity, Metrics

How To Get Started With Kanban In Software Development

There’s a lot of great talk around the inter-weber-net-o-sphere on why Kanban works in software development, how to do specific details of Kanban, how to effectively talk about it, and other such subjects. If you’re interested in a great set of resources...

Published Wed, Aug 08 2009 5:41 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Retrospectives, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban, Quality, Throughput, Workflow, Productivity

Kanban Is Process Control, Not A Process For Adding Value To WIP

There’s some very interesting conversation on Chris McMahon’s blog titled “ against kanban ”. In general, I don’t agree with what he is saying. I think that he is largely basing his current opinion on some misguided “expert” opinions rather than doing...

Published Mon, Jul 07 2009 11:06 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Management, Kanban

Why “No Issues” Is Not An Acceptable Answer

Many of the software development teams at my company now practice the daily standup from Scrum project management . There’s a lot of great value in these meetings, even if a team is not practicing anything else from Scrum. The Anti-Pattern Several months...

Published Tue, Mar 03 2009 4:54 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Principles and Patterns, Agile, Retrospectives, Management, Lean Systems, Education, Daily Standups

Favor Defect Prevention Over Quality Inspection And Correction

In the manufacturing world, you would never find a company that assembles a bunch of parts into a final product before inspecting any of the individual parts, and they would not wait until the end of the assembly line to test for the quality of the product...

Published Fri, Jan 01 2009 10:04 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Refactoring, Analysis and Design, Agile, Philosophy of Software, Standardized Work, Management, Lean Systems, Behavior Driven Development

Improving Our Industry: Its Time to Educate Outward, to Improve Inward

For so long there have been so many advocating the benefits of the various Agile, Lean, Iterative, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it-these-days methodologies. We, as software developers, seem to understand the benefits of these methods. So why, then, do...

Published Tue, Jan 01 2009 11:59 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Community, Agile, Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems

The Pathfinder: Reaching Your Organization’s Goal

Imagine that there are three group of people going out for a hike. Within each group of people, we have a goal of everyone reaching a picnic table at the end of the hike (and no one can eat until everyone has arrived). One of the people in each group...

Published Mon, Jan 01 2009 1:41 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Community, Agile, Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems

Kanban in Software Development. Part 2.5: A Variation on Queues - Pipelines for WIP and Done

In part 2 of my Kanban in Software Development series, I talked about completing a kanban board with queues, order points and limits. We saw how to take a complete development pipeline and work with a team, its processes and its bottlenecks. In the end...

Published Mon, Dec 12 2008 12:07 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Analysis and Design, Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban

Kanban in Software Development. Part 2: Completing the Kanban Board with Queues, Order Points and Limits

In Part 1 of Kanban in Software Development , I introduced the concepts of kanban boards and pipelines. I also showed a very simple example of creating a pipeline for our development process. However, there were some obvious limitations in what I showed...

Published Mon, Dec 12 2008 2:06 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Philosophy of Software, Retrospectives, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban

Kanban in Software Development. Part 1: Introducing Kanban Boards and Pipelines

In the world of Scrum , XP and other forms of Agile software development , many teams use visual control systems to outline the various steps that software goes through during development. These boards are known by various names - Scrum boards, card-boards...

Published Mon, Dec 12 2008 10:45 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban

Kanban - Pulling Value From The Supplier

Before I start talking about how our team is going about our implementations of Lean and Kanban, I wanted to start by outlining my current understanding of what kanban is. I'm hoping that this will set the ground work for the rest of my Adventures...

Published Thu, Nov 11 2008 4:03 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban

Adventures In Lean

In the last six months, my team has undergone some very radical changes and has turned into a full blown Agile team. I'm very happy with our success and I consider this team to be the shining example in our company, at the moment. Now, in keeping...

Published Wed, Nov 11 2008 11:30 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Standardized Work, Retrospectives, Management, Lean Systems

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