A lot of times when I go to conferences, I’ve already got a slew of half-formed ideas and thoughts from the amazing communities with whom I hang out. The conferences have been fantastic for helping me refine and validate those ideas, but it’s been a while since I’ve come across anything genuinely new.

LSSC 2012 was very, very different - ( Read more... )

I’ve been invited to speak at the Lean Software and Systems Conference in Atlanta, April 21st to 23rd 2010.
BDD, often described as “TDD done well”, is strongly aligned with Lean
principles. It’s a pull-based approach to delivering software that
matters through the whole software lifecycle, from vision to code. It
minimises rework and over-delivery ( Read more... )

I just read Michael Dubakov’s excellent post on Kanban psychology, and the shift in thinking from the habits we’re taught to a more rational behaviour.

This post made me remember what it was like, being a developer who’s discouraged from sitting and reading blog posts, or books, or learning more about the job, but who can’t find much meaningful ( Read more... )

Sometimes people ask me, “When we’ve gone Agile… when we are fully Lean… what will it look like?”

The only answer I can come up with is this:

Things will be changing. You’ll be in a better place to respond to change. Your people will have a culture of courage and respect, and will seek continuous improvement, feedback and learning.

I don’t know ( Read more... )

Chris McMahon mentioned my example of a coaching kanban board in the second of his series of posts against Kanban. That it comes across as simple and infantile in Chris’s example is my fault; I only really touched on the “signal” aspect of the kanban board in this conversation, and didn’t go into more detail. So, in this post, I hope to correct ( Read more... )

Andy, the release manager at my current client, asked, “How can I get the teams to follow a consistent process where readying the release for deployment is concerned? We have different version control systems, different build processes… how do I make them behave in the same way?”
Ask for consistent outputs, not consistent processes

In a waterfall- ( Read more... )

My first ever article, “Pulling Power: a new Software Lifespan” is up on InfoQ. BDD, Feature Injection, Lean and Kanban playing nice together!

Big thanks to Dan North, Chris Matts, David Anderson, Amr Elssamadisy and the amalgam of developers who make up “Jerry”; also to the Thoughtworkers who reviewed my article and gave me advice, and the ( Read more... )

Simon Baker has written a superb post, capturing the elusive nature of empowerment.

He mentions “an environment that tolerates mistakes to cultivate learning”. For me, this is an essential part of innovation; of the Lean metaphor that suggests a Software Development team is more like a Product Development team (designing new cars) than a Production ( Read more... )