program selection system

The first principle of Agile is to deliver value to the customer. Understanding Business Value better can often do more than anything else to make your efforts better. We need to improve our Business Value Engineering.

In this Discovery Session, we intend to look at the principles and values that underlie Business Value and its uses. And we will look at how we practice Business Value Engineering throughout the life of the effort. Expect challenges, not pat answers. This discussion will enable you to improve your Business Value Engineering.

After three and a half years of using Scrum and still providing inconsistent quality and not getting better, we are embarking on an attempt to improve by using Lean ideas and modifying our Scrum implementation. For some time now, our attempts to make Scrum work for us have mostly failed. Scrum out of the box, in a company with over 100 developers and testers, was not working as expected. This presentation is a report of our efforts to improve our Agile approach by using Lean and other ideas.

As the popularity of agile development spreads, more and more companies are discovering that simply breaking down projects into small iterations is not sufficient. Agile methods require changes in management, analysis, architecture, design, testing, quality assurance as well as project management. Given the large adjustments required, where can a team or enterprise look for guidance in its transition? The principles of Lean Software Development provide such guidance.

Systematic is an agile CMMI level 5 company, where the default way of working is based on Scrum and story based early testing. Several years of Experiences in combining CMMI with Scrum, has shown that the mix of Scrum and CMMI provides strong synergies and results, which were reported during Agile 2007. This session presents specifically how agile methods like Scrum and story based early testing development can be sucessfully augmented with inspiration from CMMI. CMMI provides solid support for what disciplines to consider.

Nobuaki Katayama, Chief Engineer of Lexus/SC and IS, talked to software engineers about process, principles, and practices of new car development in Toyota, at Developer’s Summit 2008 in Tokyo on Feb. 13, 2008. In this session, I’ll give his presentation, translated into English in place of him. It starts with CE Katayama’s introduction, explains management principles and practices of a huge car development project, and concludes with people side of the development. I add some episodes about Agile and engineering found during our pannel session of the conference.

I will present examples of process improvement (Kaizen) in factories in Japan, demonstrate how the Toyota Production System (TPS) constantly improves the way things are done to meet changing customer needs, involving wokrplace(Gemaba) people. After presentation of key TPS concepts, small groups will explore commonalities between Agile and TPS by developing Mind Maps, and then exchange the results. Note that this is a re-run of the same program at Agile2007, presented by Mary Poppendieck and Kenji Hiranabe(me). This time, the content is shortened, focusing on the best stories.

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 traditional Agile methods. The presenters will describe their experiences implementing these ideas at Yahoo!

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.

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How can we as software professionals and craftsmen know that we are producing the most valuable system at just the right time for our users? 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. In this demonstration participants will experience how a real working system can be constructed from the ground up by employing popular industry “signals” to “pull” the creation of working software.
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Come and take it! Learn how to build the right system where each agent takes just what they need, just in time, to create value for the customer.

How can we as software professionals and craftsmen know that we are producing the most valuable system at just the right time for our users? The kanban method and the concept of “pull” from lean manufacturing, in combination with agile values and practices, provide a powerful guide for how we can improve our profession by employing popular industry “signals” to “pull” the creation of working software.
By inverting the thought process and focusing first on delivery, “pull” challenges mainstream approaches to software development by reconsidering how value is delivered to the customer.

In this demonstration participants will experience how a real working system can be constructed from the ground up through the definition of executable specifications. See how through a series of micro-iterations, requirements can pull the creation of executable specifications, developer tests, production code, and refactorings.