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Lean from the Trenches

Lean from the Trenches is all about actual practice.

Find out how the Swedish police combined XP, Scrum, and Kanban in a 60-person project. From start to finish, you'll see how to deliver a successful product using Lean principles.

We start with an organization in desperate need of a new way of doing things and finish with a group of sixty, all working in sync to develop a scalable, complex system. You'll walk through the project step by step, from customer engagement, to the daily "cocktail party," version control, bug tracking, and release. In this honest look at what works — and what doesn't — you'll find out how to:

Make quality everyone's business, not just the testers. Keep everyone moving in the same direction without micromanagement. Use simple and powerful metrics to aid in planning and process improvement. Balance between low-level feature focus and high-level system focus.

You'll be ready to jump into the trenches and streamline your own development process.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

PART I: HOW WE WORK

1. About the Project

1.1 Timeline 5

1.2 How We Sliced the Elephant 6

1.3 How We Involved the Customer 7

2. Structuring the Teams

3. Attending the Daily Cocktail Party

3.1 First Tier: Feature Team Daily Stand-up

3.2 Second Tier: Sync Meetings per Specialty

3.3 Third Tier: Project Sync Meeting

4. The Project Board

4.1 Our Cadences

4.2 How We Handle Urgent Issues and Impediments

5. Scaling the Kanban Boards

6. Tracking the High-Level Goal

7. Defining Ready and Done

7.1 Ready for Development

7.2 Ready for System Test

7.3 How This Improved Collaboration

8. Handling Tech Stories

8.1 Example 1: System Test Bottleneck

8.2 Example 2: Day Before the Release

8.3 Example 3: The 7-Meter Class

9. Handling Bugs

9.1 Continuous System Test

9.2 Fix the Bugs Immediately

9.3 Why We Limit the Number of Bugs in the Bug Tracker

9.4 Visualizing Bugs

9.5 Preventing Recurring Bugs

10. Continuously Improving the Process

10.1 Team Retrospectives

10.2 Process Improvement Workshops

10.3 Managing the Rate of Change

11. Managing Work in Progress

11.1 Using WIP Limits

11.2 Why WIP Limits Apply Only to Features

12. Capturing and Using Process Metrics

12.1 Velocity (Features per Week)

12.2 Why We Don’t Use Story Points

12.3 Cycle Time (Weeks per Feature)

12.4 Cumulative Flow

12.5 Process Cycle Efficiency

13. Planning the Sprint and Release

13.1 Backlog Grooming

13.2 Selecting the Top Ten Features

13.3 Why We Moved Backlog Grooming Out of the Sprint Planning Meeting

13.4 Planning the Release

14. How We Do Version Control

14.1 No Junk on the Trunk

14.2 Team Branches

14.3 System Test Branch

15. Why We Use Only Physical Kanban Boards

16. What We Learned

16.1 Know Your Goal

16.2 Experiment

16.3 Embrace Failure

16.4 Solve Real Problems

16.5 Have Dedicated Change Agents

16.6 Involve People

PART II: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE TECHNIQUES

17. Agile and Lean in a Nutshell

17.1 Agile in a Nutshell

17.2 Lean in a Nutshell

17.3 Scrum in a Nutshell

17.4 XP in a Nutshell

17.5 Kanban in a Nutshell

18. Reducing the Test Automation Backlog

18.1 What to Do About It

18.2 How to Improve Test Coverage a Little Bit Each Iteration

18.3 Step 1: List Your Test Cases

18.4 Step 2: Classify Each Test

18.5 Step 3: Sort the List in Priority Order

18.6 Step 4: Automate a Few Tests Each Iteration

18.7 Does This Solve the Problem?

19. Sizing the Backlog with Planning Poker

19.1 Estimating Without Planning Poker

19.2 Estimating with Planning Poker

19.3 Special Cards

20. Cause-Effect Diagrams

20.1 Solve Problems, Not Symptoms

20.2 The Lean Problem-Solving Approach: A3 Thinking

20.3 How to Use Cause-Effect Diagrams

20.4 Example 1: Long Release Cycle

20.5 Example 2: Defects Released to Production

20.6 Example 3: Lack of Pair Programming

20.7 Example 4: Lots of Problems

20.8 Practical Issues: How to Create and Maintain the Diagrams

20.9 Pitfalls

20.10 Why Use Cause-Effect Diagrams?

21. Final Words

A1. Glossary: How We Avoid Buzzword Bingo

Index

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 176
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781934356852
  • Genres
  • management, business, software, technology, programming, leadership, technical, productivity
  • Release date
  • 2011