Posted by Pieter Rijken mid-afternoon: September 23rd, 2011
In Agile methods focus on short feedback cycles and regular delivery of (business) value. Both are supported by having short lead times. Kanban is one of the tools to manage the flow of tasks and reduce lead times.
This article shows how to reduce lead times even further.
One of the mechanisms in Kanban to manage flow is to explicitly set a limit on the amount of work in progress for a process step. By modifying this to include part of the next process step, this article shows that the amount of work in progress is limited more and therefore also lead times are reduced.
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Posted by Marnix van Wendel de Joode in the early afternoon: September 2nd, 2010
In Agile, everyone agrees on the concept that continuous improvement is a good thing. In Scrum and also in most Kanban practices we even have a ceremony to support this, namely The Retrospective. This periodically occurring meeting (often every other week) with the entire team plays a vital part in the process and in team dynamics.
In most retrospectives, focus is on improvement. Questions are asked like ‘What is going wrong or could be done better?’, ‘What can we do to improve things?’, ‘Did we actually improve?’. While there is real value in these questions (and they should definitely should be asked), there is another part of a retrospective that is also very important: The Good Things.
Posted by Machiel Groeneveld around lunchtime: May 28th, 2009
A few months ago I was joined a software development team that had some problems getting their process right. The team was doing Scrum by the book, apart from regular production releases they were doing it all: sprints, planning, retrospectives, Scrum board etc. This team didn’t need too much explanation of Scrum so I could dive into development straight away, or so I thought. They struggled with getting the sprints right, their velocity was decreasing and spirits were low. Luckily we managed to change our process by changing some basic Scrum practices and replacing some of them with Lean practices, inspired by the new Kanban articles and presentations. Productivity is now higher than ever and we can now focus on what really matters: product quality and customer satisfaction.
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Posted by Machiel Groeneveld mid-morning: January 5th, 2009
Will infoq.com have a “Lean” section in the near future? Given the recent rise in blogs, presentations and articles on Lean subjects, don’t be surprised if, in 2009, Lean will be the new Agile.
Lean is a process management philosophy derived from the Toyota Production System that aims to provide more value with less work. Lean originated from mass manufacturing, but has successfully been applied in other industries such as health care, travel industry, and services. That means Lean can also be applied in software development.
Although Lean is becoming more popular in the Agile community, the views on what Lean is, differ widely. Martin Fowler tries to avoid the entire Lean vs. Agile debate by stating that they are equal. Although the idea of keeping Lean within the boundaries of Agile has its appeal, not everyone agrees.