Thanks to the essential Agile Radar, I found my way today to Pete Abilla’s review of The Toyota Mindset by Yoshihito Wakamatsu. It’s fascinating to read a distilled version of Taiichi Ohno’s thinking, and the core concepts really stand out. Having often listened to John Seddon I’m wary of “lean”. He, too, learned from Ohno, … Continue reading
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of presenting to the Y-Combinator London tech startup community on the subject of Creating Brilliant Teams. You can see the video of this and the other presentations over on the HN London Vimeo page, so here’s just a very brief summary of what I said: Space to learn. … Continue reading
A tweet escaped from Product Tank this week from Benjamin Mitchell, watching Tom Loosemore talk about alphagov: “It’s a mix of ignoring them [non-Agile managers] & making shit up” #ProductTank How is this consistent w/ Agile values of openness & trust? There’s a conference-worth of material to unpack from that question. You can make up … Continue reading
As much as I love agile development, there is something more important that’s often forgotten: a good understanding of software development. Oh yes — and a little common sense wouldn’t go amiss sometimes, too. A case in point: Paul Stack tells a tale of software woe, in which his workplace has taken up a new … Continue reading
In all teams, large and small, in all organisations, there is a constant pressure to deliver features at the expense of writing code well. The tension is between “do it now” and “do it right”. When I speak to developers about this I remind them that they are a professional and that no-one (or at … Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago I was privileged to be invited to attend and speak at Tom Gilb‘s 12th Gilb Seminar. It continued Tom’s decades-long work, and was focused on moving from “a state of nice-sounding words for objectives and solutions to clear quantified objectives and constraints to define the problem with clear quantified assertions … Continue reading
There was a fair bit of criticism last night of the UK government’s approach to agile development, and in particular its use of agile on the huge Universal Credit (UC) project. This was at a SPA 2011 session entitled “Towards Agile Government”, which came off the Institute for Government’s report on the subject. A straw … Continue reading
There’s a fascinating piece by Michael Feathers in which he questions the what “inventory” is in the context of lean software development, and concludes that companies should remove the code supporting unprofitable features. I don’t agree with his piece entirely, but his thinking, and the debate in the comments, draws out a curious aspect of … Continue reading
In the previous post I picked up on Aaron Levie’s analysis of complicated organisations and suggested the root cause was departments working to different agendas, compounded by technology which solidified current complicatedness. In this post I want to suggest how these things might be tackled. First a disclaimer: I’m really not pretending this is easy. … Continue reading
Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box.net, advocates simple technology solutions for large companies. That should be obvious, so why do companies go for complicated solutions? He argues that it’s mainly because people compare feature lists, and longer feature lists win. I’m sure that’s true, but I’d argue that a more significant reason is that … Continue reading
