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Posts Tagged ‘Agile’

A few month ago Chris Sterling and I were carrying out a Cutter Technical Debt Assessment and Valuation engagement for a venture capitalist who was considering a certain company. We discovered various things in the code of this company. More noteworthy, my deep domain expertise led to Chris discovering the great Greek dish Moussaka.

I have eaten a lot of good Moussakas over the years. Even against this solid gastronomic background I can’t forget how the eyes of Chris lit up when he took the first bite. It took him only a tiny little time to get on his iPhone and tweet on the culinary aspects of our engagement. I then knew it was going to be a very successful engagement…

The relationship with Chris deepened since this episode. For example, in collaboration with Brent Barton Chris contributed a great article to the forthcoming issue of the Cutter IT Journal on Technical Debt. In this article Chris and Brent demonstrate how technical debt techniques can be applied at the portfolio level. They make the reader step into the shoes of the project portfolio planner and walk him through their approach to enhancing the decision-making process by using the software debt dashboard.

Chris has just published an excellent post entitled “Using Sonar Metrics to Assess Promotion of Builds to Downstream Environments” in Getting Agile and was kind enough to suggest I cross-post it in The Agile Executive. Here it is (please note that the examples given below by Chris have nothing to do with the engagement described above):

“For those of you that don’t already know about Sonar you are missing an important tool in your quality assessment arsenal. Sonar is an open source tool that is a foundational platform to manage your software’s quality. The image below shows one of the main dashboard views that teams can use to get insights into their software’s health.

The dashboard provides rollup metrics out of the box for:

Duplication (probably the biggest Design Debt in many software projects)
Code coverage (amount of code touched by automated unit tests)
Rules compliance (identifies potential issues in the code such as security concerns)
Code complexity (an indicator of how easy the software will adapt to meet new needs)
Size of codebase (lines of code [LOC])

Before going into how to use these metrics to assess whether to promote builds to downstream environments, I want to preface the conversation with the following note:

Code analysis metrics should NOT be used to assess teams and are most useful when considering how they trend over time

Now that we have this important note out-of-the-way and, of course, nobody will ever use these metrics for “evil”, lets discuss pulling data from Sonar to automate assessments of builds for promotion to downstream environments. For those that are unfamiliar with automated promotion, here is a simple, happy example:

A development team makes some changes to the automated tests and implementation code on an application and checks their changes into source control. A continuous integration server finds out that source control artifacts have changed since the last time it ran a build cycle and updates its local artifacts to incorporate the most recent changes. The continuous integration server then runs the build by compiling, executing automated tests, running Sonar code analysis, and deploying the successful deployment artifact to a waiting environment usually called something like “DEV”. Once deployed, a set of automated acceptance tests are executed against the DEV environment to validate that basic aspects of the application are still working from a user perspective. Sometime after all of the acceptance tests pass successfully (this could be twice a day or some other timeline that works for those using downstream environments), the continuous integration server promotes the build from the DEV environment to a TEST environment. Once deployed, the application might be running alongside other dependent or sibling applications and integration tests are run to ensure successful deployment. There could be more downstream environments such as PERF (performance), STAGING, and finally PROD (production).

The tendency for many development teams and organizations is that if the tests pass then it is good enough to move into downstream environments. This is definitely an enormous improvement over extensive manual testing and stabilization periods on traditional projects. An issue that I have still seen is the slow introduction of software debt as an application is developed. Highly disciplined technical practices such as Test-Driven Design (TDD) and Pair Programming can help stave off extreme software debt but these practices are still not common place amongst software development organizations. This is not usually due to lack of clarity about these practices, excessive schedule pressure, legacy code, and the initial hurdle to learning how to do these practices effectively. In the meantime, we need a way to assess the health of our software applications beyond just tests passing and in the internals of the code and tests themselves. Sonar can be easily added into your infrastructure to provide insights into the health of your code but we can go even beyond that.

The Sonar Web Services API is quite simple to work with. The easiest way to pull information from Sonar is to call a URL:

http://nemo.sonarsource.org/api/resources?resource=248390&metrics=technical_debt_ratio

This will return an XML response like the following:

  248390
  com.adobe:as3corelib
  AS3 Core Lib
  AS3 Core Lib
  PRJ
  TRK
  flex
  1.0
  2010-09-19T01:55:06+0000

    technical_debt_ratio
    12.4
    12.4%

Within this XML, there is a section called  that includes the value of the metric we requested in the URL, “technical_debt_ratio”. The ratio of technical debt in this Flex codebase is 12.4%. Now with this information we can look for increases over time to identify technical debt earlier in the software development cycle. So, if the ratio to increase beyond 13% after being at 12.4% 1 month earlier, this could tell us that there is some technical issues creeping into the application.

Another way that the Sonar API can be used is from a programming language such as Java. The following Java code will pull the same information through the Java API client:

Sonar sonar = Sonar.create("http://nemo.sonarsource.org");
Resource commons = sonar.find(ResourceQuery.createForMetrics("248390",
        "technical_debt_ratio"));
System.out.println("Technical Debt Ratio: " +
        commons.getMeasure("technical_debt_ratio").getFormattedValue());

This will print “Technical Debt Ratio: 12.4%” to the console from a Java application. Once we are able to capture these metrics we could save them as data to trend in our automated promotion scripts that deploy builds in downstream environments. Some guidelines we have used in the past for these types of metrics are:

Small changes in a metric’s trend does not constitute immediate action
No more than 3 metrics should be trended (the typical 3 I watch for Java projects are duplication, class complexity, and technical debt)
The development should decide what are reasonable guidelines for indicating problems in the trends (such as technical debt +/- .5%)

In the automated deployment scripts, these trends can be used to stop deployment of the next build that passed all of its tests and emails can be sent to the development team regarding the metric culprit. From there, teams are able to enter the Sonar dashboard and drill down into the metric to see where the software debt is creeping in. Also, a source control diff can be produced to go into the email showing what files were changed between the successful builds that made the trend go haywire. This might be a listing per build and the metric variations for each.

This is a deep topic that this post just barely introduces. If your organization has a separate configuration management or operations group that managed environment promotions beyond the development environment, Sonar and the web services API can help further automate early identification of software debt in your applications before they pollute downstream environments.”

Thank you, Chris!

Written by israelgat

September 23, 2010 at 10:30 am

Posted in devops, How-to, IT Operations, Technical Debt

Tagged with Acceptance Testing, Agile, Architecture, Brent Barton, Chris Sterling, Israel Gat, IT Operations, Java, Maven, Metrics, Moussaka, Open Source Software, Software Architecture, Sonar, TDD, XP

A Devops Case Study

A Recipe for Handling Cultural Conflicts in Devops and Beyond

with 4 comments

My Agile 2010 workshop “How We Do Things Around Here In Order To Succeed” will weave together four trends that I am witnessing in my practice:

The ascendance of Agile portfolio management in a world characterized by loosely coupled processes
Devops dynamics are becoming more and more characteristic of end-to-end Agile/Kanban patterns
Viral spread of technical debt metrics in software governance
Increasing use of boundary objects in the enterprise context

The workshop is structured around three case studies/exercises that will take about two-thirds of the allotted time (the morning of August 9). The other third provides the theory and tools to be used in the three workshop exercises and (hopefully) in many future engagements participants in the workshop will carry out. Deep technical knowledge is not required – the workshop targets any Agile practitioner who has conceptual grasp of culture, software development, IT operations and portfolio management.

The #1 takeaway from the presentation is the details you need to know about creation and capture of lasting value through end-to-end Agile initiatives.

Here is the workshop agenda (still subject to some minor tweaking):

Introduction to Cultural Framework
Exercise #1: Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Culture
Change Behavior, Not Culture
When Organizations Clash
Exercise #2: Conflicts in Devops
The Agile Flywheel
Exercise #3: Using Technical Debt as a Boundary Object in Devops
Bringing Organizations Together Through Enlightened Governance Loops

I look forward to meeting you in the workshop and learning from your experiences and insights!

Israel

Written by israelgat

August 3, 2010 at 6:05 am

Posted in Cultural Aspects, devops, Events, How-to

Tagged with Agile, Agile 2010, Agile Portfolio Management, Boundary Object, Executive Coaching, Governance, Israel Gat, IT Operations, Kanban, Organizational elements, Technical Debt

The Things They Say

with one comment

Here is a compilation of summaries of Amazon reviews on the Kindle edition of The Concise Executive Guide to Agile:

If you are such a decision maker, and like most are hard-pressed for time, then you must read this book. Dr. Gat cuts right to the chase and gives pearls of wisdom – that come from having “done it himself” when it comes to the daunting task of TRANSFORMING an organization into successfully applying Agile methods. If you’re a team leader and you need executive support and buy-in, then buy this book for the key people whom you value the most. Give it to them as a gift. They will thank you for it!

“The Concise Executive Guide to Agile” by Israel Gat is a must-read for enthusiasts of agile methods at all levels of the organization. Israel has well over 30 years of industry experience, has his PhD in Computer Science, and has helped manage an agile rollout involving 1,000 software developers. While there are many technical and managerial treatises on agile methods emerging in increasing frequency all of the time, Israel’s new guide is meant to explain the essence of agile methods to R&D, Marketing, Sales, Program Management, Professional Services, Customer Support, Finance, or IT folks.

Dr. Gat goes beyond the traditional software development process literature and broadens the case for the Agile organization, with effectiveness, efficiency, and integrity – much like the Agile development process described by Israel.

A must read for any organization leader dependant on software whether it be for software for internal operations or software features built for customer sales. Israel’s breadth and depth of both knowledge and experience shine through as he provides practical advice to help you understand what Agile can and can not do for your organization.

For me, this book provided something unique, which is a look into the way high level executives think about Agile.

This book rapidly cuts through the layers of confusion surrounding Agile development and focuses on what you “NEED” to know. Dr. Gat’s vast experience shines through as he elegantly simplifies the process.

Israel’s experience and wisdom in transforming a software development culture in a very large multi-site virtual team environment is well captured… Israel has done a great job in transforming his experience into a guide. That is the beauty of the book.

This is the “must-read” book if you’re an executive charged with Agile transformation, product development, or business strategy. The insights from Gat cover all three. Most companies talk a good Agile game. If you want results, however, please pay heed to the advice in this book.

The book will help you to flexibly navigate the hurdles inherent in selling and succeeding with Agile in your business: i.e. existing methodologies, outsourcing, diverse geographies, resistance to change, and the rest. They are all explained here by someone who has apparently already successfully fought the battles. A great read!

He has been there, and this book shares the unique insights of a senior manager who guided a large organization through the change process. If you are in this seat in your organization then this book is for you.

Israel distills his broad experience and many years of wisdom rolling out Agile into a succinct overview that is deep in knowledge, but accessible.

I’ve been a fan of Israel’s “The Agile Executive” blog for some time and had high hopes for this book… and the book didn’t disappoint!

While I was looking for answers; what I found instead was much more interesting. Israel was able to collect all the wisdom of doing large scale agile rollouts into one document, highlighting the geographic features along the way. That is a lot harder to do than simply proclaiming one correct path, and, speaking from experience, more helpful to the reader than they know.

You can read the full reviews here.

Written by israelgat

July 21, 2010 at 5:37 am

Posted in Benefits of Agile, books, Scaling Agile, Scrum

Tagged with Agile, Executive Coaching, Israel Gat, Learning Agile

Balancing Agile – Guest Post by Alan Shalloway

with 3 comments

A fascinating difference exists between Agile and Business Service Management (BSM). Agile emphasizes continuous flow of value to the customer. In contrast, BSM focuses on the business – it aligns the deliverables of IT to the enterprise’s business goals. Subtle that the difference might be, the two methods evolved along quite different lines in spite of the common denominator – dealing with software.

In this guest post, Alan Shalloway – Founder and CEO of NetObjectives – discusses the implications of focusing on the business as distinct from focusing on the customer. His discussion is part of a few thought-provoking threads he weaves around the Agile Manifesto. Alan perceives the Manifesto a product of the times. He thinks aloud whether today’s circumstances require a revised manifesto.

Alan is a man of passion. While I do not always agree with him, I have a lot of respect for his quest to find the deeper truths. Furthermore, I always learn from him. Whether you agree or disagree with the opinion Alan articulates in this post, “listening” to his thoughts is well worth your time.

Here is Alan:

The Agile Manifesto was a watershed event that has forever changed the landscape of software development. So profound a positive impact of it has had, that few challenge whether it was actually correct. Manifestos are often a statement in reaction to something prevalent that needs changing. This makes them very topical and temporal – and the exact intention needs to be restated when the landscape against which it was drawn has changed. The Agile Manifesto[1] states:

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.”

At the time of its edict, this was profound and well stated. Too many software teams were:

Following a process dictated to them from outside their team

Managing according to an extensive set of artifacts that recorded where they supposedly were well before software existed

Were given a set of requirements to meet with little opportunity to discuss real needs (note, points 3 and 4 in the manifesto address this point in two ways – first recognizing that customer collaboration is necessary to discover their true needs and second that it is essential to take advantage of newly discovered information)

The manifesto represented a new paradigm from which to work – one in which the team would have better control over its destiny and where it was recognized that one had to make incremental, iterative movement towards one’s goals – both in discovering the true goal and in implementing it.

Unfortunately, the perspective from which the manifesto was created, or at least the methods which first followed the manifesto, have been extremely team centric. Not a surprise, given the paradigm at the time gave development teams too little say in their own methods. The impact of this has been, not surprisingly, success at the teams and difficult beyond the team. It is almost axiomatic now that companies will have successful team pilots only to bog down in their enterprise agile adoption efforts or even revert back to earlier methods.

I say “not surprisingly” because several things have been left out of the agile manifesto. These are:

The role of management

The role of process

The role of planning

And indirectly, the role of guiding principles

It could also be said that the driver for agile development is misplaced. I do not believe “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” This makes software groups customer driven, not business driven.

There is a subtle, but important difference. Basically, conscious or not, the Agile Manifesto is driven with a team-centric view of satisfying customers – business and management play mostly secondary roles. Unfortunately, there is a significant difference between customer driven and business driven (see the figure entitled Alignment with Vision of Business to the right). This is not apparent at the team level (the team is supposed to satisfy the customer). But definitely at the business level. Not surprising, however, since the manifesto is a team perspective it states things in terms of customer value.

Ironically, it is the over-focus on the team, however, that is robbing teams of one of their greatest tools. Clearly any method must have respecting people and providing those doing the work the ability to choose how they do their work. But this does not mean that process isn’t essential or that attending to certain laws of software development is optional. Rather it means that process can’t be imposed on teams since to do so would both rob them of respect and almost certainly be the wrong way to do things – who knows more about how to get work done than the people doing the work themselves?

But “Individuals over process” as the first line has come to be called, makes it sound like people are it. I do not think so – and I think this mindset has caused a lot of damage in many ways.

There is great evidence that the best approach is not merely get smart people onto a team and have them figure out how to solve their problems. They must be properly equipped to do so. Just being smart doesn’t mean you can solve the challenges facing you. This should be readily apparent, but in many ways, the Agile community has mostly ignored it. Actually, there is not really an Agile community any more – there are factions that have significantly different beliefs. For example, XP has long recognized the need for technical practices in Agile while the Scrum community is only just starting to get into what these are.

However, except for the Lean/Kanban community, few Agilists seem to espouse discovering and following the laws of product development flow (or even recognize their existence). This, in my mind, has led to the low rate of success in scaling Scrum to the enterprise*[2]. Ironically, it is the over-focus on people that leads many in the Scrum community to assert this lack of success is a lack willingness to take the effort to improve. This is not surprising – if it’s up to the team to succeed, then when they don’t it must be something wrong with the team or their management when they fail. I think not. I think it is the lack of understanding of the principles of software development flow.

These laws are not new. Don Reinertsen, in his iconic book Managing the Design Factory lays out much of the rules of product development. His more recent book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development he lays out 175 of these principles.

To me, true respect for people means that one must equip them with what they need to get their job done. Our thinking in the Agile community should change from “People over process” to one of “People times process.[3]” This phrase emphasizes that if either are low, you get a low productivity. Process does not ensure success. But a poor process requires heroes to succeed. We’d like good, motivated, well-intentioned people to be able to succeed.

Our new agile perspective needs to include an understanding of what teams need to know to do their work. This opens up a role for managers to actively help teams get their job done and to coach them when they have challenges or lose their way. While I will always be thankful for the Agile Manifesto, I am looking for a Business Agile Manifesto that will expand the focus from the team to the entire enterprise.

Footnotes:

[1] http://www.agilemanifesto.org

[2] Ken Schwaber, iconic leader of the Scrum community has said that “I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it.”

[3] I first heard this from Don Reinertsen. Before that I used to say “People plus process.”

Written by israelgat

April 20, 2010 at 4:40 am

Posted in Benefits of Agile, The Agile Movement

Tagged with Agile, Agile Manifesto, Alan Shalloway, Business-Driven, Customer-Driven, Don Reinertsen, Flow, Incremental, ITIL, Kanban, Ken Schwaber, Lean, NetObjectives, People Times Process, Scrum, XP

Preface from The Concise Executive Guide to Agile

with one comment

The good folks at the IEEE Computer Society are just about ready to publish my e-book The Concise Executive Guide to Agile. It will be available for purchase in the Computer Society store in May. A Kindle version will follow in June.

Here is the preface from the guide:

Preface: Connecting the Agile Dots

“The closer one listens to it, the more distantly one hears it.”[1] These insightful words about Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony apply equally well to the art of Agile software methods. The nuts and bolts of Agile methods are not likely to be very relevant to the executive. Instead, he or she needs to stand back and focus on the mindset, values, and principles that make Agile methods so powerful, and on harnessing their power to create business value.

It is the objective of this guide to provide the know-how for approaching Agile in a concise manner that requires minimal investment of time and effort by the reader. It does so by summarizing most Agile topics in a page or two with minimal use of geek jargon. Detailed coverage of a topic is left for follow-on reading in the selected references that accompany each topic and in the Further Reading appendix.

The guide targets executives as the primary audience. It gives them the principles they need to comprehend and apply in order to become effective with an Agile initiative. These executives are not necessarily software engineering experts. They come from any function that Agile affects — R&D, Marketing, Sales, Program Management, Professional Services, Customer Support, Finance, or IT. Nor are the executives restricted to companies whose business is software; they are as likely to reside in companies that embed software in their products or utilize software in implementing business initiatives. Nowadays one can hardly think of a company that would not be included in at least one of these three categories.

Four broad topics are covered in The Concise Executive Guide to Agile: rationale for Agile, implementing it, fitting it into your company, and scaling it to the enterprise level. The rationale explains why Agile is so appropriate for our time, summarizes the state of the art in Agile, and sets realistic expectations with respect to its business value. Implementing addresses critical “real life” issues such as risk assessment and mitigation, off-shoring and outsourcing, governance, and sustainability of the Agile initiative. Fitting connects Agile to the hard realities of introducing a new software method into an environment in which various processes already exist — multiple software methods as well as planning and budgeting processes. Scaling is primarily about the numerous benefits to be attained through end-to-end implementation, such as enabling new business designs that fully utilize the power of Agile.

In the course of covering these four topics, the guide puts special emphasis on the operational, financial, and business benefits of Agile methods. The overarching message is clear and simple: Agile is the most productive technology your business is not using.

[1] Giuseppe Sinopoli. “Dream and Memory in Schubert’s ‘Unfinished.’” Program Notes to his recording of the symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Deutsche Grammophon 410 862-2, 1984.

Written by israelgat

April 12, 2010 at 4:35 am

Posted in books

Tagged with Agile, Executive Coaching, Executive Guide, Israel Gat

Definition: Agile Methodology

John Heintz on the Lean & Kanban 2009 Conference

with 23 comments

Colleague John Heintz has kindly compiled the summary below for the benefit of readers of The Agile Executive. John is well known to Agile Austin folks as well as to out-of-town/state companies to which he consults through his company. You can get a glimpse of his Agile/Lean thinking by reading his blog.

Here is John’s summary of the conference:

The Lean Kanban conference last week in Miami was astounding. David Anderson did a fantastic job, and everyone who contributed had great presentations.

I am humbled and emboldened at the same time. I’ve been involved in Agile since 1999 and Lean since 2004, so I thought this was going to be familiar to me, old hat.

Here’s my confession: I’ve pretty much ignored Kanban, writing it off as just slightly different than what good XP or Scrum teams practice anyway.

Wow, those small differences make a huge impact. I am very glad I decided to go to the conference, some internal hunch finally winning.

Here’s what I thought Kanban was before last week:

A Big Visible Board

A Prioritized Backlog

Close communication, minimizing hand-offs

Rules about cards on the wall

No Iteration/Sprint boundaries (I’m thinking more efficient but maybe losing something important…)

That’s all well and good and true enough. Easy to justify writing it all off with “I already know enough to help teams make a big difference”. In fact, Kanban can be boiled down to one single rule:

Limit the number of things in work to a fixed number.

But, if that’s all there is too it, why then did I hear things like these:

Kanban is easier to introduce to teams than Agile/Scrum/XP

“People who never say anything were offering ideas” (I’m pretty sure I heard this three time the first day…)

The team felt comfortable dropping estimates/retrospectives/standup questions/…

Wait, you say, this was the first conference and obviously full early adopters! Of course people are going to succeed because they self-selected for success. Good point, but that’s not everything that’s here. For example, Chris Shinkle’s presentation was a case study of rolling out Kanban to many teams who hadn’t asked for Kanban.

So between furiously scratching down notes[1], listening and tweeting[2], I started to think to myself:

Why does this make such a difference?

Easier to create thinking and reflective teams! Isn’t that cultural change?

I had the pleasure of wrestling this “why” question out with several people, especially Alan Shalloway.

The first answers people gave me were entirely unsatisfying:

David Anderson’s reply tweet: “Kanban is easier than Scrum because you don’t change any roles or workflow and you don’t teach new practices.”

Alan Shalloway first response: “Kanban cuts out the noise and reduces thrashing.”

Sure, sure, but none of those (good) things seem likely to create: cultural change, engaged teams, or reflective individuals. Those answers are technical, details, and generally not the “emotionally” important things needed for change. Mind you, I’m not really well versed in cultural or emotional change, but being the stubborn person I am, I kept digging.

Here’s where Alan and I got, please add any insights[3]:

My hypothesis: Kanban has concrete reflective tools: like “should WIP be 4 or 5?”. Very reflective, but not very abstract or hand-wavy. People can’t often use abstract reflective tools like Retrospectives.

Paraphrasing Alan Shalloway: Kanban reduces the fear of committing to a per story estimate – a significant risk in some teams. Less fear can lead to cultural change.

(not sure who): Kanban changes the focus away from blaming an individual to examining why stuff is stuck on the board. (I hear Deming…)

—-
On to the actual trip report. Here is an abbreviated transcription of the proceedings of the conference. (Very abbreviated!)

Alan Shalloway started the conference off with no small announcement: the formation of the Lean Software and Systems Consortium. He also mentions that this consortium will be creating a body of knowledge and promoting a distributed certification process. Certifications will be a very interesting topic, my initial reaction was negative. Now I’m just skeptical 😉 I’ve got a hunch that TWI, a hidden influence of Lean, may hold some of the secrets for a successful certification method. We’ll see how this plays out.

Dean Leffingwell gave a keynote on a Lean and Scalable Requirements Model for Agile Enterprises. Very clear from executives down to team activity: maps from Themes to Epics to Features to Stories. This immediately cleared up some questions I and a client were having. My favorite quote: “If you don’t know hot to get the story out of the iteration – don’t let it in” referring to acceptance tests.

Peter Middleton presented material from “Lean Software Strategies“, co-authored by James Sutton who presented next. Peter is a professor at Queen’s University in Belfast and was the first person to really talk about the people issues. Much of what Peter related was how various practices caused people problems: recruiting and training goals (10 per week) would require recruiters and trainers to push even unqualified people into the company. That led to poor service, high-turnover, and greater costs.

James Sutton has a small personal goal: to save the middle class. His presentation did a good job ranging over various Lean and Systems thinking topics, connecting the dots to Agile. Key quote comparing Lean and Agile: “Getting Prepared” vs “Getting Started.“

Sterling Mortensen presented a case study of introducing Lean into the Hewlett Packard printer development division. He said HP was already the “best of breed” and still became much more efficient and effective. My favorite quote: “Stop Starting, Start Finishing“. Sterling also said the “One” metric was continuous Flow. I’m not sure I understand that all the way; I’d been working under the assumption the One metric was customer to customer cycle time (from concept to cash.)

Amit Rathore gave a personal case study of Lean in a start-up, http://runa.com. Amit showed many examples and talked really honestly about his experience. My favorite quote: “not released equals not done”.

Corey Ladas presented on his book Scrumban and his experience at Corbis (with David Anderson) and other projects. I bought a copy of his book out of his backpack and made him sign it.

Jean Tabaka presented a thoughtful presentation on Lean, learning, ignorance, and people. Her narrative helped me further realize how Lean, and Kanban, play into the personal issues of learning and reflecting.

Alina Hsu presented a case study of using Lean to organize the work of procuring a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) software solution, not development. She had some great things to say about how delays cause major cost overruns. One thing that reduced the delays she mentioned was to change how agreement was reached. The team defined consensus as “I can live with it”, with the rules 1) I won’t go into the hall and try to subvert it, and 2) I won’t lose any sleep. These definitions help teams make decisions faster and reduced waste.

Alan Shalloway presented on a model for understanding Lean and moving it beyond Toyota. He organized all the various concepts down into Lean Science, Lean Management, and Lean Education. Connecting this back to the Lean SSC announcement in the morning he said the consortium working to create value in those three areas.

And that was just the first day. Did anybody mention the conference day started before 8am and lasted till after 6pm? Oh, and everyone was glued into the room.

David Anderson presented a keynote on the principles and evolution of Kanban. So much information! You’ll have to read his presentation and see the video on InfoQ, but just to provide a fragment from each I wrote down:

Principled recipe for success (including Balance Demand Against Throughput)

Metrics (like WIP is a leading indicator)

Agile Decision Filter questions

Lean Decision Filter questions

Kanban decouples input cadence, cycle time, release cadence

Karl Scotland continued the detailed treatment of Kanban. Karl spoke about the Lean concept of Flow as expressed with Kanban – and even rename typical process steps to avoid any baggage with waterfall terminology. If you want to know more about how work actually gets done in a Kanban system, watch his presentation. His interesting names for for process steps are: Incubate, Illustrate, Instantiate, Demonstrate, Liquidate.

Rob Hathaway presented a case study of his work building a game portal for a publishing business. He believed very strongly that teaching from principles (Value, Prioritization, WIP limits, Quality) led to success.

Alisson Vale presented a tool… that enchanted everyone in the room. David Anderson himself said that Vale “has the highest maturity software team on the planet”. Now, tool support often isn’t the answer, and many teams get real value with a physical board – a tool isn’t a Silver Bullet. If a tool makes sense for you – this tool absolutely blew us away. I asked Alisson about buying or helping with the tool and he said they were considering open sourcing it! I offered my coding skills in extending it for my own clients to help reach that goal.

Linda Cook presented a case study of using Kanban at the Motley Fool. Her presentation does a good job of showing how little is necessary to get a lot of value out of Kanban.

Eric Landes gave a great case study about using Kanban in an IT development shop. His team went from struggling to turn requests around (41 days) to a rapid 9 day turn around. Again, his discussion of the team dynamics and reflection were interesting to how a tiny bit of Kanban can have a huge impact.

Eric Willeke’s presentation was visually beautiful, but you’ll have to watch the InfoQ video to get the value out of it. It contained only two words in a quote bubble (from memory “Momma! Pirates!”) and was the backdrop for the story that he told. His story highlighted to me, again, that Agile doesn’t always stick but Kanban seems to.

Chris Shinkle presented a multi-case study on rolling Kanban into a large software consultancy. Very interestingly, and contrary to much discussion before, Chris presented a practices first, principles later message. This again resonated strongly to me that Kanban practices are somehow special in encouraging people to reflect and reach for the principles.

David Laribee presented an opinionated view on leadership and change using Lean. This quote stuck with me: “people support a world they help create”. His style of leading is to drive from “Values -> Practices -> Tools” and his presentation wove a story of Agile/Lean process change. Also, I really enjoyed his injecting reference to hardcore technologies: REST, Git and OSGi were fantastic to see in a Lean/Kanban presentation.

That was day two. I’d said we were all glued to the room before, now as I type this I realize our brains were coming a bit unglued at this point. Every presentation was top-notch, barely time for questions, breaks were cut short, and we came back for more as fast as we could. Oh, and apparently we collectively drank 2.5 times as much coffee as the hotel usually allocates for a group our size.

I’m not going to summarize the Open Space. Too many topics and changes in direction. You just had to be there 🙂

Cheers,
John Heintz

[1] I used the first 25 pages of a brand new notebook… for a 2.5 day conference… Every session had an overwhelming amount of information, and I’m glad InfoQ recorded video.
[2] My twitter account is http://twitter.com/jheintz, and you can follow everyone’s conference coverage at http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23lk2009.
[3] I’m going to keep following up on this topic in my personal blog: http://johnheintz.blogspot.com

Written by israelgat

May 11, 2009 at 3:00 pm

Posted in Events, Kanban, Lean

Tagged with Agile, Alan Shalloway, Alina Hsu, Alisson Vale, Amit Rathore, Chris Shinkle, Corey Ladas, David Laribee, Dean Leffingwell, Eric Landes, Eric Willeke, Git, InfoQ, James Sutton, Jean Tabaka, John Henitz, Karl Scotland, Linda Cook, OSGi, Peter Middleton, REST, Rob Hathaway, Scrum, Scrumban, WIP, XP

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