InfoQ eMag: Lean & Kanban

The Lean & Kanban eMag brings together the latest thinking on the application of Lean and Kanban in the software world. It examines topics ranging from identifying and removing waste in the software process, designing for devops and continuous delivery, the overlap of lean, Kanban and agile, practical implementation of Kanban in software development and how these approaches contribute to innovation.

Contents of the Lean & Kanban eMag include:

Applying Lean Thinking to Software Development Lean’s major concept is about reducing waste, meaning anything in your production cycle that is not adding value to the customer is considered waste and should therefore be removed from the process. Steven Peeters explains how you can apply Lean principles in an IT environment.

Queues – the true enemy of flow No-one wants IT projects to be late. But when they are, it’s rarely because of how long the actual work takes. Tasks and projects spend more time inactive, sitting in a queue, than being worked on. Despite this, most project management offices measure activity, not queues. This article examines why we should track queues and quantify their cost in order to make meaningful gains in speed of delivery

Kanban Pioneer: Interview with David J. Anderson Kanban pioneer David J. Anderson recently went to Brazil to present a course on Kanban, and gave a wide-ranging interview to InfoQ Brasil editors.

Implementing Kanban in Practice At the Lean Kanban conference, InfoQ asked Dr. Arne Roock how a team can evaluate whether Kanban is the right tool, and how to kick it off. Dr. Roock offers some prescriptive advice.

Using Kanban to Turn Around Distressed Projects This case study describes how Kanban and lean development techniques were used to rescue a distressed project that had violated its budget, schedule, and quality constraints. The article presents a detailed account of how the techniques were introduced mid-project to establish control over a chaotic project environment, and is supported with several charts that show the team’s progress.

The Evils of Multi-tasking and How Personal Kanban Can Help You Sandy Mamoli explains how to avoid multi-tasking by using personal Kanban and other Agile practices applied at the individual level.

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The Perfect Dev/Test Lab: 10 Principles that make it Possible

Hyper-agility in software development requires infrastructure and automation that not only keeps pace with development processes but actually helps accelerate cycles and improve overall quality. It is arguably economically infeasible to build an ideal lab entirely on-premise due to the bursty and transient nature of dev/test workloads, but now with new technologies that normalize the clouds, hyper-agile development and test is increasingly within reach of most enterprises. The 10 ingredients listed below and described in the article at can make for dev/test lab nirvana.

1. Agile dev/test has bursty patterns and requires practically infinite pool of infrastructure resources
2. Developers should have self-service access to infrastructure
3. Ability to test on replicas of production
4. Infrastructure should be automated at the application level
5. Continuous integration – from application to infrastructure
6. Easy collaboration between dev and test teams across locations
7. Ability to reproduce bugs
8. Rapid prototyping
9. Ability to monitor usage of resources
10. Cost efficiency
11. Bonus: Extreme Testing

Evaluating Agile and Scrum with Other Software Methodologies

In general selecting a software development methodology has more in common with joining a cult than it does with making a technical decision. Many companies do not even attempt to evaluate methods, but merely adopt the most popular, which today constitute the many faces of agile. This article uses several standard metrics including function points, defect removal efficiency (DRE), Cost of Quality (COQ), and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to compare a sample of contemporary software development methods.

There are about 55 named software development methods in use, and an even larger number of hybrids. Some of the development methods include the traditional waterfall approach, various flavors of agile, the Rational Unified Process (RUP), the Team Software Process (TSP), V-Model development, Microsoft Solutions Framework, the Structured Analysis and Design Technique (SADT), Evolutionary Development (EVO), Extreme Programming (XP), PRINCE2, Merise, model-based development, and many more.

The data itself comes from studies with a number of clients who collectively use a wide variety of software methods. The predictions use the author’s proprietary Software Risk Master™ tool which can model all 55 software development methodologies.

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