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http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Software-Development-Agile-Toolkit/dp/0321150783 At about 180 pages or so, it is a quick read. I have heard lots of talk about Lean, Kanban, etc. and thought it was time to sit down and read Mary and Tom Poppendieck's 2003 book on the topic. I found the book to be intensely...
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Of course that statement on it’s own can obviously be shown to be fallacy. When you consider the context of continuous improvement, learning or generally advancing our own capabilities and understanding, though, this statement can be quit liberating. Why? Because without failure, you are not learning...
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I was thinking about target conditions and the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle earlier today when a code related issue that I was having popped into head and decided to meld with the current string of thoughts. The resulting thought was leading me toward wondering if a PDCA approach to test-first development...
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This is a follow up to the post http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/hex/archive/2009/11/06/using-msdeploy-to-automate-your-enterprise-application-remote-deployments.aspx The only trouble I have run into using this approach is that the runCommand does not bubble up error code or exit code from the...
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In my last post , I talked about how we like to track bugs, with just pieces of paper. At lot of the responses were interesting, but I think some came back to the issue of “what is a bug?” Some felt that bugs needed to live in a more durable system (as if paper isn’t durable, and previous...
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I’m of the opinion that a process must demonstrate the need for software, before software is put in place to manage that process. Bug tracking is a process, but often we jump straight to a software solution for managing/tracking bugs before considering lower-tech, lower-risk and lower-overhead...
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Early this week we ( Jeffrey Palermo and I ) gave a Continuous Integration Workshop in Austin. We were able to record the workshop and our company Headspring Systems made the recordings available on their website. There is just under 3 hours of video covering the following topics: reducing...
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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?” I responded to the list with a little bit of my experience...
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At the continuous integration workshop Headspring Systems held in Austin this week one of the topics that we covered was Database Integration. We are still in the process of publishing the videos of the entire workshop but I thought I would publish this snippet (30 minutes) that talks about how We Do...
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There’s a new mailing list over on Google Groups surrounding the ideas behind Agile Developer Skills Certification . After reading this post by Ron Jeffries , I joined up with the group and started reading the traffic. I generally share the same opinions as many of the people on this list about multiple...
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I am doing a Continuous Integration Workshop next Tuesday. The admission is free and will be held at the Microsoft Office. To register go here: http://www.headspringsystems.com/services/agile-training/continuous-integration/ This will cover the basics of what continuous integration...
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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 processing to be carried out at a constant and...
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There were some changes to the nCover xml reports for code coverage which will break your existing integration with cruise control .net . Specifically if you use the Statistics feature of Cruise Control which is one of the best features it provides IMHO, the xml nodes have changed and ncover no...
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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. I still advocate and coach Scrum at my office...
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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 surrounding many of these subjects, I would highly...