Lean Software Engineering

There’s a nice theme going on at this year’s Agile conference from practitioners of kanban and other pull-like systems. I wanted to make a t-shirt that said something fun like Have you pulled your kanban today?, but ultimately got voted down.

Here’s a list of pull-related topics. Please let me know if I missed anything.

Tuesday, August 5

Agile Game Development with Clinton Keith: Agile video game teams have adopted not only Scrum and XP, but are adopting Lean, Kanban and other practices to find ways to make better games.

Wednesday, August 6

Value Stream Mapping – Extending Our View to the Enterprise with Alan Shalloway: As effective as Agile teams have become, many times it isn’t the team that is the problem. In many cases, the structure within which the team exists is more problematic than the performance of the team itself…

Come and Take It! Lean Pull Applied with Rod Coffin and Don McGreal: The concept of “pull” from lean manufacturing challenges mainstream approaches to software development and reconsiders how value is delivered to the customer by inverting the thought process and focusing first on delivery.

GTD + Kanban + Round Robin for Product Owners with Thomas Nilsson: This demonstration will show how a Kanban board (task board with “states”) can be combined with a “round robin” scheme to keep analysts and Product Owners working on multiple tasks of high priority, but with potentially long lead times and fuzzy done criteria.

Thursday, August 7

Future Directions for Agile with David Anderson: How does our definition of agile evolve? How do we learn and adapt as a community? What about new ideas like Behavior-Driven Development, Kanban, Real Options, and others? Are they agile or not?

KFC Development – Finger Lickin’ Good with Karl Scotland and Aaron Sanders: This workshop explores three important Lean concepts – Kanban, Flow and Cadence (KFC) – which can be combined to generate a more pipeline-based approach to software development, as opposed to the more common timebox-based approaches of more Agile methods.

Estimating Considered Wasteful: Introducing Micro-Releases with Joshua Kerievsky: Micro-releasing has simplified our process by eliminating traditional agile planning activities…Instead, our focus remains on the mini-release. What important user story or stories do we most need to ship to production in the next few days?

Friday, August 8

Starting a Kanban System for Software Engineering with Value Stream Maps and Theory of Constraints with Corey Ladas: Any process with a recognizable workflow can be made into an efficient pull system by applying the kanban method. We can use kanban to transform either a traditional phase/gate software development system or a time-boxed iterative system into a lean continuous-flow system.