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For Agile developers only familiar with Scrum or XP, it may be unclear how Lean relates to what they do. This article introduces Lean Thinking and how it enhances software development. Ning Lu of ThoughtWorks China identified the biggest obstacle to Lean or Agile as the mind-set developed during the period of large-scale manufacturing.
An Agile Coach is someone who helps a team, or an entire organization, adopt and improve their agile practices. AgileCoachCamp, held this spring in Ann Arbor Michigan, was the first ever conference specifically for agile coaches. The participants, who came from as far away as India, Sweden, and Ukraine, self-organized to put on more than 60 sessions during the open space conference.
Andy Hunt's interview last month talks about his progression from pragmatic programmer to Agile development to his latest interest – Pragmatic Wetware. "Wetware is the stuff in your head. That's the thing between your ears that's really where all the action is – that's where all the software development actually takes place."
This recent inquiry, by InfoQ China editor Jacky Li, picked 5 very different cases of Scrum adoption in China, which got different results, and asked: Why did you use Scrum? How did you adopt it? What problems did you encounter, and why did it succeed or fail? Despite the small sample size, it's an interesting comparison, pointing out that improvement doesn't ensure success.
The discussion of applying lean principles to software development has largely focused on identifying and eliminating waste (in Japanese: muda). Lean Thinking equally aims to remove overburden (muri) and unnecessary variation (mura). Roman Pichler discusses the relationship of the "three M's" and proposes to eliminate overburden as the first step toward a leaner process.
At QconLondon 2007 Jim Coplien spoke with "Pragmatic" Dave Thomas for InfoQ. This energetic 30-minute interview runs the gamut of Dave's wide-ranging interests: 'agile' publishing; how to turn what you love doing into a book; programming (and methodology) monocultures; staying limber with code "katas"; and advice for academics: help your students live with the passion of a 5-year old!
Called "the grandmother" of the agile methodologies, DSDM V1 was released in 1995. The methodology is owned and collaboratively developed by the members of the not-for profit DSDM Consortium, and until V4.2 was only available to members. But the recent V5 or "Atern" release is now publicly available. Director Hugh Ivory provided an overview at Agile2007.
Of course, "anything more than 'barely sufficient' process is waste," but what does that mean for your team, or my next project? In this 60 minute presentation from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, Todd Little shared a model to help choose the right "flavour" of Agile for different kinds of projects, and discussed the importance of 'steering' throughout the project's duration.
The goal of VSTS is to provide a tool that is not prescriptive and highly customizable for managing the software development process. Kevin Jones provides a soup to nuts framework for utilizing VSTS to support a development team and build better applications. He covers project management, source code control, class designers and various designers available to software architects.
This book guides the reader on crafting their own agile adoption strategy focused on their business values and environment. This strategy is then directly tied to patterns of agile practice adoption that describe how many teams have successfully (and unsuccessfully) adopted them. Business values are also a component of these patterns so your adoption is always focused on addressing your particular environment.
Domain Driven Design is a vision and approach for designing a domain model that reflects a deep understanding of the business domain. This book is a short, quickly-readable summary and introduction to the fundamentals of DDD; it does not introduce any new concepts; it attempts to concisely summarize the essence of what DDD is, drawing mostly Eric Evans' book, as well other sources since published such as Jimmy Nilsson's Applying Domain Driven Design, and various DDD discussion forums.
Scrum, arguably the fastest-growing Agile methodology, is well described in the original Scrum books, which tend to be read once and put aside. The SPRiNT-iT coaches have abstracted the basics to produce a compact reference to help teams facilitate all Scrum meetings and create the Scrum artifacts. The book doesn't teach Scrum, but offers trained teams confidence to run their first successful Sprints - successes that will increase the acceptance of Scrum in their organization.
