Agile software development has been around for almost ten years. Some believe lean is the next step in our evolution. How do agile and lean play together, and what does the lean influence mean for the future of agile? Kanban is a signaling system, devised by Toyota and used in their just-in-time manufacturing process. Often, it is implemented as cards on a board that shows the status of work. David Anderson describes how you can use the kanban approach to build a high maturity enterprise that can scale agile practices to support large, enterprise software development projects. He describes how kanban facilitates a quantitatively managed, predictable, and continuously improving organization. David also examines future trends in scaling agile, including the real option theory, CMMI's role in high maturity organizations, agile portfolio management, agile governance, and the emergence of lean software supply chains.

Some agile teams rely on user stories alone to articulate requirements, struggle with requirements rework on large agile projects, and spend too much time thrashing on requirements during iterations. Requirements expert and agile coach, Ellen Gottesdiener shares a wide spectrum of requirements practices ranging from traditional to agile to help you break out of the cookie-cutter mentality that some take toward requirements elicitation. Practitioners from a traditional environment learn how classic requirements practices are adapted on agile projects. Agile practitioners learn how they may lighten, tighten, or incorporate a subset of traditional requirements practices to mitigate risks associated with missing, erroneous, or conflicting requirements. Gain an appreciation of ways to adapt requirements practices to fit various project situations so you can do the right things for your project.

What if the process improvements you are trying to make are not where your real problems lie? Assuming where your problems are is often the biggest problem. Alan Shalloway presents value stream maps, a Lean tool that focuses on finding waste in your development process. Alan presents an example of a value stream map that resulted in a twenty percent productivity improvement to the development team without modifying how the team worked. After this introduction to value stream mapping, you will create your own maps to learn how to improve your own processes and to learn the basic lean principles of optimize the whole, deliver fast, and build quality in. Alan demonstrates how focusing on improving the flow of software development from a time perspective can lead to a higher quality, lower cost process.

Agile projects and traditional projects are tracked differently. The key difference is that agile projects track outcomes; traditional projects track activities. Project managers who are new to agile are often unsure which measures are relevant to which stakeholders and how to interpret them, and how agile metrics tie back to some of the more familiar forms of project reporting. Dave Nicolette explains how agile projects are tracked, which metrics are useful to which audiences, and how to monitor project health, delivery effectiveness, and the quality and value of the results. Dave describes the reasons to choose particular metrics, how to use metrics for informational, diagnostic, and motivational purposes, and the time-sensitivity of metrics. Dave also explains the meaning and use of measures peculiar to agile methods, such as "velocity," "running tested features," "earned business value," and "burn charts".