The Lean Startup teaches us to focus on learning about what really works for our customers. It advocates using the scientific method for running data driven experiments in very short cycles. But, continuously running end-to-end experiments need the total cooperation of the entire business. Truly cross-functional teams are required which is also one of the goals of Devops. Let’s take a look how the ideas of The Lean Startup and Devops enrich each other to successfully create product development flow.
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How are Lean, Agile, and Devops related to each other?
You hear a lot about various agile approaches. Things like Lean, Scrum, Kanban, and Devops seem to be important but it’s hard to sort them out. How do they relate to each other and where to start? Let me try to structure these ideas for you.
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Has your Scrum implementation caused more problems than it solved?
Implementing Scrum helps your development department but breaks the old way of doing things, so the overall process actually slows down.
Everyone was bashing your development department. You were too slow, you were the bottleneck – if only development would be faster, we could earn so much more money … you know what I’m talking about. It was time to change something so you introduced Scrum. A couple of months (and quite a few crises) later your team churns along with impressive speed and better quality. The bottleneck is gone. Surprisingly though, the business results haven’t moved an inch. What’s wrong here? Weren’t we supposed to be swimming in money if development was faster?
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Scrum What? New Community Edited Q&A Site About Agile, Lean, Kanban and Scurm
A lot of people I meet are interested in agile software development. Either they’ve heard about it or they participate in projects which use Scrum, Kanban, or Extreme Programming. They wonder whether it makes sense to do pair programming, which Kanban tools to use, how to get started with test driven development or how to deal with bugs in Scrum.
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What have we done for you today?
I’m a firm believer of release early and often. If there’s more than 10 new commits in our code repository awaiting release, I start to get uncomfortable. Whether it’s extra “inventory sitting on our shelves” instead of in your browser, or the uncertainty of “going live” with a bunch of new stuff and then running into a problem. Which change caused the problem?
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Agile on steroids
Agile software development is a great thing. It makes people deliver real value faster. Based on the agile manifesto there are a lot of processes and frameworks available (XP, SCRUM or Lean Software Development anyone?), which try to enable teams to develop better and more relevant software. So far, so good.
In our company, we’re only five people – all involved in building and running our web application. We started from a very #notagile approach, and successfully introduced agile practices like user stories, story points, a backlog, and the notion of velocity achieving a tremendous increase in our productivity. But nowadays, we’ve moved on. The strict processes don’t fit our current way of working any more.
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Agile Essentials – Speed instead of chaos
Yesterday I gave a talk about the “why” of agile software development based on ideas and concepts of lean manufacturing. It shows some tools to speed up development by reducing waste and by working in small batches. Check it out and share it if you like it.
Agile Essentials
View more presentations from webops.
Relaunching your website – the last excuse for a big bang release
I really love working in small batches as it ensures timely feedback and fast realization of customer value. Usually, we release two to three times a week – each release featuring only a handful of user stories. While I got used to working in this mode over the last couple of years, it’s really impressive if you look at how different working in big batches is.
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