Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development The purpose of development/IT is to deliver value quickly - not just for a team, but for the entire organization. If you reflect on this, it's not about going fast, it's about removing delays.  Delays are typically waiting for folks, getting feedback late, detecting errors late, or just going to work on...

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Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development While adding value to the customer is the ultimate goal, there is more than customer value. There are actually at least five different types of business value: knowing what will be of value to the customer knowing how to build this building this deploying this value so it is consumed by the customer being...

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Hi everyone.  To pick the pace back up I'm going to write either shorter blogs or, as in today, I will take some previous work and mold it into this work.  I appreciate your patience and will get things going again. Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development I believe that one of the essential components of successful Agile adoption across teams is...

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  Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development.   I really appreciate the 2-3 new people who commented on the day 0 blog and joined our group. It got me to write today's entry on the flight home from the Scrum Gathering - something I almost certainly wouldn't have done otherwise.  So keep reading and getting friends to join - it helps.   I've been wanting...

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Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development.   The Scrum Gathering starts in Las Vegas today where I am presenting a talk this afternoon.  Figured I should do a Scrum based lesson today.  I have been saying for years that the Chicken and Pigs story is counterproductive and is a symptom of an over-reaction to management.  I wrote a blog about this Is...

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  Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development.   I've been hearing two disparate views of estimation, and it does feel "camp" oriented.  The Scrum camp doesn't question estimation but is looking for better ways.  It takes much more time than it feels it should.  The reason for this feeling is that it takes much more time that it should.  Planning poker is...

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Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development.   Relatively early in my consulting career, I realized that it’s not simply the low hanging fruit you go after, you have to attend how one thing sets up another.  As people learn, some lessons set up others.  I call this the “pick up sticks model for building curriculum.”  Some practices also change the...

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Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development. This blog is going to be as much (or more) personal than technical.  I had already listed The Fundamental Attribution Error on this list.  But I had a great experience (and insight) today that I wanted to share.  First, a quick summary - the fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to blame the...

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Continuing with the  100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development. I appreciate the comments I've been receiving on this project. While I am not changing the title as yet, I believe it would be more appropriately named: "The 60 things you need to know, the 10 things you need to forget and 10 other useful things to be effective in software development."  A bit long, I...

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Continuing with the  100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development. One of the big banes and puzzles in Agile has been how to coordinate teams.  Scrum of scrums is still being espoused even though its track record is worse than abysmal.  Much of the reason for the insistence on a team of teams coordination model is due to: the lack of understanding the importance of a holistic...

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Continuing with the  100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development. For the last several years I have been claiming that the Agile Community has been a bit myopic on the team.  I'm not questioning whether the team was a good place to start Agile - it's what we did.  It was certainly the easiest.  It also didn't require significant changes to corporate management, strategic...

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OK, I'm cheating a little on this one, but watch this 7 1/2 minute lightning webinar Why Seeing the Value Stream Is So Important  When one sees that our workflow does not match our management hierarchy, one can better understand: one of the main challenges to developing software why Scrum is a great way to avoid this challenge but how it doesn't work as well as the size of the organization...

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  Continuing with the  100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development. Scrum talks about self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Let me make it clear, this is the best team structure I know.  Some folks have construed this to mean - teams of generalists.  That is not what it means.  It means the team has all of the skills and knowledge required to create valuable software....

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I formed LKU as an equal partner with David Anderson in 2011 with high hopes of an organization that would manifest the values of industry service, thought leadership and inclusion.  I envisioned it as a place to provide industry awareness of the value of Lean and Kanban, a listing of courses on Lean and Kanban, and as a way of identifying those truly experienced Lean and Kanban trainers and...

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Continuing with the  100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development. If you read day 1, you knew what was coming today.  Acceptance Test-Driven Development is one of the greatest trim-tabs of software development. ATDD is one of the most powerful, easiest to introduce practices available.  It is about making sure you know what you need to build before you build it.  It has a...

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I had to think a bit on what to have be #1.  Was it something on Acceptance Test-Driven Development, one of the serious trim-tabs of software development?  Or be the underlying reason that drives Lean and Agile?  I ultimately picked How Delays Induce Work (don't worry about the title of the article that is brought up being different) because it is the underpinnings of Lean.  When how delays cause...

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I have been in software development for almost 43 years now.  This doesn't mean I'm smarter than anyone, it just means I'm older, er, I mean I've seen a lot..  One thing I've seen repeatedly is arguments and discussions about how to do things.  Re-entrant code in the 70s, structured code in the 70s as well.  4th generation languages in the 80s, object-oriented code in the 80s and patterns in the...

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The Challenge of Conflating Size of Work and Time of Work In my Lean-Agile classes, I often ask people how far away something is.  For example, if I’m in Seattle I’ll ask them how far away Portland is. I usually get an answer like “about 3 hours.”  I respond by asking “I can walk there in 3 hours?” “3 hours to drive.”  “What if I have a private helicopter?”  We might think this is just some...

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Emergent design is not something you do because you are doing Agile and you don’t have any choice because you don’t understand what you need to build.  Emergent design is a better way to design – even when you know what you want your system to do. I’ll admit I didn’t understand this until about 12 years ago.  I was in a situation where I understood what I wanted my system to do, but I couldn’t...

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My blog on Patterns of Agile Adoption: Team Focus Sets Us Up To Fail has created a bit of a stir on Twitter.  Thought I'd put together this table of Agile anti-patterns, their underlying causes and their solutions! What's important to remember is that every solution to each of these problems was postulated with Lean-Thinking.  Makes me believe that other problems, previously unencountered, might...

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