- When Local Optimization Won't Make a Difference A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned at the office during my measure and manage flow in practice talk that we should invest more in optimizing the whole flow and reduce the effort spend on local optimizations. In retrospect, I didn't spend too much time on explaining why, because it had a very loose connection to the subject of the talk, and I assumed that the audience would understand what I meant anyway.
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- See the Whole Flow - An Exercise for Managers to Start a Transition Last week, I got an interesting assignment from my boss.
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- Visualize the Flow on the Highest Possible Level I gave an internal workshop about Kanban a couple of days ago, and the colleagues who were there looked enlightened when I mentioned that Kanban should visualize the whole process, because this is the place where it can help the most. Don't get me wrong, it is also fine to have Kanban on the team level, but the real optimization and improvement should happen on the highest possible level.
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- Daily Stand-up is About the Future not the Past In the last couple of weeks, I was thinking a lot about daily stand-up meetings for two particular reasons.
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- Visit at Cluj Napoca My old friend Victor invited me to Cluj Napoca, Romania to talk about software development in practice. There were three talks in the morning at his company evoline and a fourth talk late afternoon at the local meetup group. We started the day with an introduction to Kanban, because the audience knew about Agile, but Kanban was something new, and additionally we needed it for the maintenance-related presentation: Kanban Basics for Beginners Revised from Zsolt Fabok After a short break we continued with a longer talk about maintenance and how to use Agile, Lean, Kanban and leadership techniques in order to stabilise a maintenance situation: Kanban Basics for Beginners Revised from Zsolt Fabok The last presentation was about how to use Agile techniques without saying Agile: Agile in Stealth Mode from Zsolt Fabok My talk at the meetup became a bit longer than I expected, but we had - at least I felt like that - a great discussion how the software development process evolved at Digital Natives - my current company - and, uniquely, we talked about what we were doing right and where we failed: Evolution of the Software Development Process at Digital Natives from Zsolt Fabok I promised a list of books worth reading.
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- When Expand and Collapse Got Beaten Today's post is an instructive story about mixing various good patterns and ideas. They are very useful separately, but when one uses them together, they may lead to problems which nobody wants to deal with at all. We found several different defects in a certain feature, and in order to reduce handover costs I collapsed them together to make an umbrella defect (defect1+defect2+.
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