Lean & Kanban
Articles
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Value Stream Mapping Gone Wrong Value Stream Mapping is a powerful lean tool that is commonly used in Agile and DevOps implementations as a foundation for continuous improvement and transformation, but its application doesn’t always lead to the expected or desired result. Author Jeff Pierce's article helps you to avoid some of the most common failings companies encounter when they try to implement it. |
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Why You Should Be Talking Less Agile and More Flow “Flow,” defined as the movement of business value from customer insight to product delivery, is a fundamental prerequisite to agile success. Surfacing and visualizing the end-to-end workflow is a foundational requirement for enabling companies to master software-based solutions at scale. To take agile forward, you first need visibility into flow through these essential metrics. |
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Agile Project Management: 10 Tips from the Masters In today’s fast-paced world, organizational agility is critical to business success. However, it’s common for there to be a clash between the traditional top-down business culture and the agile business philosophy. Agile project management is not just a set of processes and predetermined activities, but rather a genuine philosophy that forces organizations to embrace a brand-new mindset. |
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How to Implement an Agile Methodology into Tech Support Tech support is notorious for having a bad reputation about their service, both on the receiving side and the serving side. Fortunately, the situation is improving, particularly in innovative organizations that are adopting an agile approach to tech support. Agile is helping customer service teams prioritize tasks, collaborate, and continuously improve. What can you do to be agile in your organization’s tech support? |
Interviews
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Shifting Left and Going beyond Agile: An Interview with Michael Nauman In this interview, Michael Nauman, a testing lead for AutoCAD Web, explains how we can go beyond basic agile principles. He digs into the current state of shift-left testing, the importance of aligning your DevOps with your automation, and using agile as a starting point on your quality journey. |
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Scaling Agile: A Guide for the Perplexed: An Interview with Sanjiv Augustine
Podcast
In this interview, Sanjiv Augustine, the president of LitheSpeed, sheds light on a handful of scaling frameworks, including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), and the simple scrum of scrums meeting. |
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The Fundamentals of Agile: An Interview with Jeff Payne
Podcast
In this interview, Coveros CEO and agile instructor Jeff Payne discusses why you should make the move to agile, its many benefits, and how to transition. He also explains his SQE Training course, Fundamentals of Agile Certification. |
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STAREAST 2015 Interview with Matt Heusser on Lean Software Testing
Video
In this interview, Matt Heusser covers how most organizations test now, presents ways you can improve your company's approach to lean, and demonstrates lean tools that can help you understand software development and test flow in a different way. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Scrum: Back to Basics So you think you know Scrum? Using the whimsical notion of farm animals and light-hearted visuals, take a refreshing review of the entire Scrum lifecycle as an intuitive set of roles, responsibilities, and handoffs. Particular attention is placed on what the ScrumMaster and product owner are expected to do at each handoff. |
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Continuous Process Improvement Using Balance and Flow Finding a balance between too much and too little process can be quite a challenge. Tom Wessel shows how to apply lean change management and kaizen principles to achieve continuous process improvement. Also, Tom suggests the use of simple metrics to verify that improvements are actually taking place. |
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From Curmudgeon to Kanban It didn't take long for Stacia Viscardi to realize that as effective as agile can be, a plan-driven mindset may not be the best approach for every project or every team. Breaking the rules and embracing whatever it takes to motivate the team to get a project to doneness—and delighting the customer along the way—is a much better approach, even if it means breaking away from fixed iterations. |
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The Lean Test Canvas Taking lessons from the lean business model, Matt Heusser explains how a tester can present different values and properly set expectations with the team using the lean test canvas. His approach starts with defining who the customer is and ends with key qualitative measures that will be used to ensure success. |
Conference Presentations
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Pushing Pennies: Playing with the Principles of Product Development Flow
Slideshow
Lean and agile concepts can sometimes be counterintuitive, but the right game or exercise can effectively demonstrate those concepts, providing a practical basis for conversation and learning. Being able to talk beyond anecdote and theory and actually demonstrate why something works is a powerful statement. In this workshop, Bill DeVoe will execute some games you can take back to your organizations to help them understand some basic lean and agile concepts regarding optimization of flow and throughput. Through these activities, we’ll demonstrate the value of a prioritized backlog, optimized batch sizes, limiting work in progress (WIP), and more. |
Bill DeVoe
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Lean-Agile Learning through Games
Slideshow
Most agile practitioners first learn agile by reading a book, attending a class, or attending local meetings. But learning lean and agile concepts works best when we're able to put some concrete examples and practice behind the concepts. By adding a set of games and exercises that teach and reinforce lean and agile concepts to our toolboxes, change agents can provide some practical basis for conversations both inside and outside their organizations. In this talk join experienced agile coach Bill DeVoe, as he shares two of his “go to” games. First, up will be The Name Game, a game that reinforces the downsides of multitasking and benefits of completing work. And second will be a modified version of the Scrum Penny Game – a multi-round exercise that demonstrates many lean-agile concepts, like flow, prioritizing value, and delivering small batch sizes over large ones. |
Bill DeVoe
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Measuring Flow: Metrics That Matter
Slideshow
Are you considering kanban but not sure how you’ll predict delivery without story points, velocity, and a burndown chart? Or are you part of a Scrum team but feeling like your team could benefit from improved flow within your sprints? In this session, join Julie Wyman and Hunter Tammaro as they explore key kanban metrics for measuring team flow and predictability. In the first half, they will introduce metrics including lead and cycle time, throughput, and the cumulative flow diagram. They’ll review what each represents, discuss easy ways to collect them, and show how they are similar and different from common waterfall and Scrum metrics. In the second half of the session, Julie and Hunter will provide a couple of different sample sets of these metrics for you to work in small groups, practicing how to read them in order to find opportunities for team improvement. |
Julie Wyman
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A Lean Tour of Lean Software Development
Slideshow
Lean software development has been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focused on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you might otherwise get from lean. Ken Pugh describes what lean... |
Ken Pugh
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