Agile 2009 - Lean

Killing the gatekeeper: introducing a continuous integration system

flacoste — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 03:17:01 +0000

This is the story of how the Launchpad (https://launchpad.net) development team switched to a continuous integration system to increase several flows in their development process:

flow of changes on trunk;
flow of changes requiring database schema upgrade;
flow of deployed changes to end users.

To switch to a buildbot (http://buildbot.net) based system meant violating a very old company taboo: risking a trunk that doesn’t pass its test suite. The risk of a broken trunk was offset by allowing each developer to run the full test suite in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

First, Kill All The Metrics!

nickolaisen — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:33:26 +0000

How well are we served by our current metrics? Do metrics such as developer and tester productivity, ROI, and on-time / on-budget help us improve results? Or, do such metrics drive us towards negative behaviors? In this workshop, we describe the foundation for meaningful metrics. Workshop participants, via a series of exercises, translate this foundation into metrics that they can immediately use. This workshop results from the response I received during my Agile 2008 presentation on the CIO and agile teams. There was a great deal of interest on the topic of aligned, meaningful metrics.

Kanban adoption at Software Engineering Professionals (SEP)

cmshinkle — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:03:28 +0000

In 2004, SEP tried adopting Agile practices. However, Agile failed to have the desired lasting impact across the entire organization. Things changed in 2007, when SEP implemented Kanban for the first time. We will explore how Kanban teams at SEP matured through the lens of the Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition. We will examine what this pattern has meant for institutionalization of Lean in the organization. We will discuss a counterintuitive technique for higher success and adoption rates of new methodologies. Finally, we will review common pitfalls teams encountered adopting Kanban.

Become a Better Agile Practitioner: Learn from other sources

mike.sutton — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:08:27 +0000

Want to improve your team? Take a drama class! Want to measure how your agile adoption is going, take a business course!! This session explores the often overlooked practices in other industries for inspiration on improving agile practice in software development. From waste management and lean manufacturing to understanding motivational and sustainable development with NLP, I want to help people begin to look at things differently and perhaps find their own fixes from the rich variety of disciplines in everyday life that they can apply to agile software development.

Agile's Too Slow: Developing a Facebook App For the Obama Campaign

acslocum — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:11:51 +0000

Priorities shifted twice a week. My favorite lightweight practices were all too heavy. Facebook thinks I might be a spammer. On November 5, the code became totally worthless. It was the best project I’ve been on!

Come and hear about a project that was too strange for normal, comfortable agile methods. I hope you can learn from my experience, and make sure you are bringing the right tools and processes to your next project. Focus on the principles of agile (communication, simplicity, feedback, courage) instead of the practices (CI, pairing, iterations, etc).

Scrum and CMMI: from Good to Great - are you ready-ready to be done-done

ruseng — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:46:21 +0000

The introduction of Scrum at a CMMI Level 5 company doubled productivity and cut defects by 40% compared to waterfall projects in 2006 by focusing on early testing and time to fix builds. Systematic institutionalized Scrum across all projects and used data driven tools like story efficiency to surface Product Backlog impediments . This allowed them to systematically develop a strategy for a second doubling in productivity. Two teams have achieved a sustainable quadrupling of productivity compared to waterfall projects. We discuss here the strategy to bring the entire company to that level.

The Bottleneck Game: Discover ToC, Agile, Lean and Real Options through play

PascalVanCauwenberghe — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 13:05:05 +0000

To make lasting changes, we need to visualise the situation, understand the system, know how to improve it and work together. The Theory of Constraints tells us how to do all that.

In this game, we apply the “Five Focusing Steps” process improvement method from ToC. Step by step we use Agile, Lean and Real Options techniques to make our “work” more fun and productive.

After the simulation game, you’ll be able to apply these techniques to your work.

You’ll be able to use the open source “Bottleneck Game” to share these techniques with others.

Max. 60 players

The Beer Game with Agile Teams - MIT Game Theory in Agile Project Management

tlooy — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:26:16 +0000

This presentation illustrates, using an animated Agile Story Card Wall, the concepts of Lean’s Work in Progress, Drum–Buffer–Rope from Theory of Constraints and Systemic Thinking from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. The presentation, originally inspired by the MIT Beer Game, uses Flash animation to show the flow of story cards across a Story Card Wall over 10 iterations, demonstrating the effects on the team’s throughput as a result of a staffing decision made during the project. The presentation also includes an Excel spreadsheet to do ‘What If’ scenarios.

Push, Pull, What is the difference

ellnestam — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 09:24:10 +0000

In this talk Ola Ellnestam explains the differences between push and pull in a software development context.

The difference between push and pull is described and discussed. Followed by examples from other industries. Mentioning Toyota and Dell. After this rather brief introduction follows a simple and easy to understand exercise.

The Lean Lego Game

dtsato — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:50:16 +0000

After revolutionizing the automobile industry, Lean principles have been applied to different knowledge areas, such as software development. However, many people haven’t been introduced to the concepts that made Lean successful. In this interactive session, the participants will work in a small Lego production line, experiencing the problems and applying Lean practices to overcome them. 8 to 20 participants, divided in 4 teams, will learn about: systems thinking, push vs. pull systems, waste, etc. We will also compare the production line scenario with the software development industry.