This Tuesday, I had my first brown bag lunch talk at prezi, where I talked about measuring and managing the flow. Here are my slides:
Tag Archives: Kanban - Page 2
Meetup: Kanban in 5 Minutes
Posted by Zsolt
on 2011/08/04
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Yesterday evening I gave a 5 minute long lightning talk at Bp New Tech Meetup about Kanban focusing on the measure and manage flow principle.
Here are my slides:
Thanks for coming and listening to my talk!
P.S: since five minutes aren’t enough for presenting the whole principle, I’m going to write a post about it soon.
Third Meetup – Open Space
Posted by Zsolt
on 2011/07/22
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This Wednesday we held the third event of the Budapest Lean and Kanban Meetup Group, which was excellent in my point of view, and we had great discussions.
In the beginning we collected the following topics:
- How to handle parked or stalled items in the workflow (8)
- How to help people to get rid of requirement specifications (7)
- Is it possible to implement a pure top-down pure Kanban system? (1)
- Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (9)
- Balance between improvements and production code (11)
Everybody had three votes, and we voted on each topic in a round-robin fashion. The received votes are given in brackets. We started with the most voted topic, then we continued with the second and closed the evening with the third one. Read more »
Physical and Electronic Boards
Posted by Zsolt
on 2011/07/13
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Several weeks ago, I went to a team leader event with @csapoz and Krisz, where – besides other interesting topics – we talked about the usage of physical and electronic Kanban and Scrum boards. At that time I thought that electronic boards were evil – kill communication and collaboration -, but I decided to give a try to their suggestion: use the physical board for tracking and collaboration, and use the electronic board for administration.
It turned out that the idea is excellent, and my early fears were groundless. My colleagues are hardly using the electronic tool, and every important decision and discussion is done in front of the physical board.
As an electronic tool, we are using redmine in order to
- store our user stories, feature requests and defects
- record queued, started, finished dates for our cumulative flow diagram (CFD)
- record estimated and spent times for improving our planning, and for our Product Owner
Our post-its on the Kanban board have the following information:
- redmine issue number and a short slogan
- queued, started, finished dates for tracking ageing items
- number of times an issue had to be moved back
We have been working with both systems for almost two months now, and there isn’t any administrative overhead, and actually it is easier to generate charts from the database of redmine than from post-its.
Usually, electronic tools come with fancy AJAX based boards, and it is really tempting to use them, but actually, they aren’t that advanced at the moment – lack of flexibility for example -, and they kill the collaboration.
I know that I could set up the tool so that I get yet another annoying email about a change, but when I see somebody moving a post-it on the physical board, I know that something has changed, I can go there and talk about it. No electronic tool can replace this experience.
What do you think? If you are using electronic tools, how are you using them?
Reducing Waste in Testing – The Problem
Posted by Zsolt
on 2011/07/06
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Testing is the most important part of any kind of software development methodology, but it is also the most neglected one. Nowadays, when an organisation does testing, it produces such a high amount of waste that the whole development process becomes very expensive, which makes it harder to win projects over the competition and risks the existing relationship with the customer.
When an organisation follows Lean thinking, then it is capable of finding and eliminating waste through Kaizen, which means more output with fewer resources: less expenses and more revenue.
Lean thinking does not bother with testing and technical details, it just gives you the idea and approach, the rest depends on you, and how you implement it. In this post, I’m going to share how I would find and eliminate waste created during testing.
There are different kinds of waste (you can read more about them here), but first let’s have a look at their consequences on the level of the organisation: wasting money, losing trust and revenue.
Most of the organisations work like this:
This is a quite common structure. A large company (the customer) outsources some work to a start-up company (the organisation), and provides services to somebody else (the external customer). The same roles appear at large multinational companies as well, where the organisation may be a division inside the large company.
Before going any further it is very important to clarify the two processes of testing:
- Verification: what I implemented is working
- Validation: I implemented what the customer wanted
Without giving any spoilers on the upcoming paragraphs, I can tell you that in nine cases out of ten, the root cause of the testing-related problem is the misuse of these processes.