Lean Software Development

Lean Software Development - An Agile Toolkit - Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck

Seven Lean Principles

Eliminate Waste

The Seven Wastes of Manufacturing	The Seven Wastes of Software Development
Inventory	Partially Done Work
Extra Processing	Extra Processes
Over Production	Extra Features
Transportation	Task Switching
Waiting	Waiting
Motion	Motion
Defects	Defects

Amplify Learning

• Feedback
• Iterations
• Synchronization
• Set based development

 Decide as late as possible

•  Options thinking
•   Last Responsible Moment
•   Making Decisions

Deliver as fast as possible

• Pull Systems
• Queuing Theory
• Cost of Delay

Empower Team

• Self Determination
• Motivation
• Leadership
• Expertise

 Build Integrity In

•  Perceived Integrity
•  Conceptual Integrity
•  Re factoring
  
•  Testing

 See the whole

•  Measurements
•  Contracts

Get the real stuff from the following link
Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit


Stay Tuned and Have Fun

The Art of Project Management

Art of Project Management - Scott Berkun

Definition

• Project management is about using any means necessary to increase the probability and speed of positive outcomes or simply put "Making good stuff happen"

Key Insights

• Project Management and software development are not sacred arts
• The simpler your view of what you do, the more power and focus you will have in doing it
• Simple doesn’t mean easy

Overview of Project Management Activity

• Figuring out what the project is (Planning, Scheduling, Requirements Gathering)
• Shepherding the project through design and development work (communication, decision making, and mid-game strategy)
• Driving the project through to completion (leadership, crisis management, end-game strategy)

The Juggling Act (The Human Angle)

 Balancing Traits (Tom peters – pursuing the Perfect Project Manager)

http://www.tompeters.com/col_entries.php?note=005297&year=1991

Eight Dilemmas to be juggled

• Ego/no-ego
• Autocrat/delegator
• Tolerate ambiguity/pursue perfection
• Oral/written
• Acknowledge complexity/champion simplicity
• Impatient/patient
• Courage/fear
• Believe/skeptic

Visioning

Typical distillation cycle

• Marketing Requirements Document->Vision/Scope document->Specifications->Work Breakdown Structure

 Five qualities of good vision

• Simplifying
• Intentional
• Consolidated
• Inspirational
• Memorable

Getting it Right

• Writing well requires one primary writer
• Volume is not quality
• Does the vision accurately reflect our goals and intentions for this project?
• Is the vision helping leads and individual contributors to make discussions and reject requests that are out of scope?

Requirements

• Requirements – What we need to do ?
• Specifications – How will we do ?
• Implementation – Do it

Writing good specifications

• Ensuring right things get built
• Provide a schedule milestone that concludes a planning phase of the project
• Enable deep review and feedback from different individuals on the course that the project will take

 “The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding what to build. No other part of the conceptual work is as difficult in establishing the detailed technical requirements, including the interfaces to people, to machines, and to other software systems. No other part of the work so cripples the results if done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later. Therefore, the most important function that the software builder performs for the client is the iterative extraction and refinement of the product requirements” – Fred Brooks

Quality Requirements

• Provide a plan for requirements negotiation and iteration
• Hunt down erroneous assumptions
• Hunt down missing information
• Define relative priority to each requirement
• Define or eliminate unintentionally ambiguous language

Planning

• Milestone length should match project volatility
• Be optimistic in the vision and skeptical in the schedule
• Bet on design
• Plan checkpoints for add/cut discussions
• Inform the team about planning philosophy
• Gauge the team’s experience with problem space
• Gauge the team’s experience in working together
• Take on risks early

Scheduling

 Schedules have three purposes 

• Make commitments about when things will be done
• To encourage everyone who’s contributing to a project to see her efforts as part of a whole (Impose a forcing function. A forcing function is anything that –when put in place –naturally forces a change in perspective, attitude or behavior. So schedules are important forcing functions for projects)
• Tool to track progress and to break work into manageable chunks

In all cases methodologies need to be adjusted and adapted to fit the specifics of a team and a project and that’s only possible if you have a foundation of knowledge

Ultra simplified model of scheduling – Divide into three phases

• One for design
• One for implementation
• One for testing

Scheduling as a Learning Curve

• Schedule estimation grows in accuracy over time
• Schedules are simply a kind of prediction
• No matter how precisely they are drafted or how convincing they appear, they are just a summation of lots of little estimations, each one unavoidable prone to different kinds of unforeseeable oversights and problems.

 Estimation 

• Good work estimates have a high probability of being accurate and bad work estimates have a low probability
• Establish baseline confidence interval for estimates
• Lead programmers must set the bar for quality estimations by asking good questions and  taking wise approaches that the team can emulate
• Programmers should be trusted
• Estimate depend on the programmer’s understanding of the project goals
• Estimates should be based on previous performance
• Specification or design quality should be to whatever point engineering needs to make good estimates

Communication

Stages in communication

1. Transmitted
2. Received
3. Agreed
4. Understood
5. Action

Communication pitfalls

• Assumptions
• Lack of clarity
• Not listening
• Dictation
• Problem mismatch
• Personal attacks

Quotable Quotes from the book

• A man fears the tiger that bit him last instead of the tiger that will bite him next
• Human beings, who are almost unique[among animals] in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so – Douglas Adams
• “I like working with good people because if I come up with an idea, they come up with a better idea, then I come up with an even better one, and so on. It’s a leapfrog process, and the work becomes much better than it would be if I only did exactly what I want”
• The way the universe works is big decisions don’t necessarily come with great amount of time to make them
• Probability is cold and heartless and it helps to remind us that entropy is everywhere and is not the friend of projects or their managers
• All successful projects are simply a long series of adversities that must be overcome. Far from it being unusual to face adversity, it is normal and our business to overcome it. The real test is not when we are successful when there is no adversity but when there is and we triumph

Get the real stuff from the following link

The Art of Project Management (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) 

Stay Tuned and Have Fun.

Our Iceberg is Melting

Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions - John Kotter, Holger Rathgeber

Set the Stage

• Create a Sense of Urgency
• Help others see the need for change and the importance of acting immediately.
• Pull Together the Guiding Team
• Make sure there is a powerful group guiding the change-one with leadership skills, credibility, communications ability, authority, analytical skills, and a sense of urgency

Decide what to do

• Develop the Change Vision and Strategy
• Clarify how the future will be different from the past, and how you can make that future a reality.

Make it happen

• Communicate for Understanding and Buy In.
• Make sure as many others as possible under-stand and accept the vision and the strategy
• Empower others to act
• Remove as many barriers as possible so that those who want to make the vision a reality can do so.

 Produce Short-Term Wins

• Create some visible, unambiguous successes as soon as possible.

 Don’t Let up

• Press harder and faster than the first successes. Be relentless with initiating change after change until the vision is a reality.

 Make it stick

• Create a New Culture
• Hold on to the new ways of behaving, and make sure they succeed, unitl they become strong enough to replace old traditions.
• The role of thinking and feeling
• Thinking differently can help change behavior and lead to better results.
• Collect data, analyze it.
• Present the information logically to change people’s thinking.
• Changed thinking, in turn , can change behavior

• Feeling differently can change behavior more and lead to even better results.
• Create surprising, compelling and if possible visual experiences
• The experiences change how people feel about a situation
• A change in feelings can lead to a significant change in behavior

Get the real stuff from the following link

Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions

Have a look at

www.ouricebergismelting.com

www.theheartofchange.com

www.johnkotter.com

Stay Tuned and Have Fun.

Project Management Practioner's Conference - 2010 Bangalore

It was an interesting event and the most interesting part of the two day conference was everything went on time.  To see practice in action by the preachers in the same stage is some kind of a rarity and kudos to the entire PMI team for making it look so simple

To be frank they indeed had reserved the best for the last

T.N.Seshan showed why he is considered as a demi-god for most of the youngsters in India. Age did not wither him or custom stale his infinite variety. His thirty minute speech looked like thirty seconds and I could only hear the continuous applause and see the standing ovation he received on entry and exit. I was so overwhelmed that I completely missed what he was saying. He was asking the youth to take on bigger projects like ‘eradication of poverty’, ‘restoring peace in Kashmir’ and work for project that have a deeper and meaningful impact. When asked how he managed to make a difference in every undertaking he took despite hurdles, he said that he was brought up believing in Lord Tennyson’s verse ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’.

Professor Sadagopan followed Seshan’s address with a cameo performance.  Great teachers are great influencers and he is undoubtedly one of them. He began by saying that he was put in a hard spot by the organizers who asked him to speak after a man who had the last word on any subject! He said the following, to complete anything in time we need to ‘fix a muhurt’. If we can get a million marriages done on time, make the Brahmoutsav in  Tirupati happen in time , we can get half of the projects we do in time. He said Project Manager’s should develop the following characteristics

·         Being Gutsy, in other words having the guts to make a difference

·         Study Successful Whiz Kids in Project Management like T.N.Seshan and E.Sreedharan of Metro

·         Be Resilient and cool under crisis

He also emphasized that if we need to become world class, we need to strive for world class infrastructure. He said there was only one auditorium in the entire country in Hyderabad that is capable of holding a world class conference like the yearly w3c conference. Incidentally they are bringing the W3C conference to India next year and he said that has taken them 6 years of work!

Professor Y.S.Rajan, the person who co-authored ‘India Vision 2020 and The Scientific Indian’ emphasized the need to disaggregate and make things simple for all of us. He said that we need to bring technology to the trapezoid of the 700-800 million who live in the unorganized sector and impact the quality of those lives.

All of the above talks continuously argued on the need for taking up projects that impacts a significant portion of the society in a lasting way.

The following notes give a distilled summary of some of the talks that were enjoyable

SMASH Innovation: Smashing the hand-mind-market barrier by Dr Gopichand Katragadda of GE

·         “Create with Freedom”

·         “Nurture with Passion”

·         “Change with Detachment”

Ten ground rules for successful innovation

Rule	Example Company Cited
Know your end customer	P & G
Know your business and market priorities	Intel
Find and articulate your passion	Apple
Develop the voice of the future	Starbucks
Set aggressive goals	Microsoft
Map goals to actions and focus on actions	GE
Work as a team	Toyota
Communicate	3M
Fail early and iterate to success	Pfizer
Celebrate small and big wins	South west Airlines

Lunar Space Mission by Mr A.Krishnan of ISRO

The most important aspect of the mission was to discover water on the moon and to a great extent it was successful. I could see the engineer in him talking and the pride was awesome. 

These are some of the key aspects of the talk

·         Mission achieved with 0.2% of the national R & D budget

·         Mission was considered 100% successful

·         For the first time six payloads from international centers including NASA was piggybacked into the launch vehicle. This was never the case earlier. We always piggy backed onto other satellites.

·         Mission pulled India into the prime league and made other nations look up to us as equals

·         No IP was violated.

·         The closest moon mission by a competing country had the budget twice of the 386 crores spent on this mission. However when asked how we could manage with such a budget he quipped in with a remark , ‘Well, we are poor scientists’

Invisible hands at the FIFA world Cup 2010 by Mr. Chetan Joshi of Mahindra Satyam

Mahindra Satyam provided the complete event management, extranet and onsite support services to FIFA for the world cup.

Some of the key aspects of the talk were

·         Agile and Scrum employed successfully for a 200 person project for three years

·         There were 50 iterations over a period of three years

·         100% uptime during the event

·         Logistical challenge of Staffing and Managing around 125 people in SA for working 24/7 during the event

·         Continuous Regression testing was emphasized

The other key note talks from IBM and panel discussion on innovation emphasized the following

I could see the vision of the companies imbibed into the speaker’s DNA. For example IBM people who came and spoke articulated the ‘solutions for a smarter planet’ and their theme of future where everything is going to be ‘Instrumented, Interconnected and Intelligent’.

·         Create a sense of urgency when there are dearths of ideas

·         Get out of the comfort zones

·         Innovation can be managed

·         Demand more as individuals and citizens

·         Just enough is not good enough

The other notable talks were on

Aadhaar – The UID project by Dr Ashok dalwai.

Interesting thing to note was the emphasis on simplicity in collecting data and also the verification process which involves the collection of thumb impressions of all the ten fingers and the iris. More details can be had from (http://uidai.gov.in)

Digital Hampi – From Ruins to Glory by Mr Ram Budihlal

A very interesting project funded by India Innovations Labs in Wipro. Stressed the need for ‘Open Innovation’ and getting out of the day to day ‘factory mode’.  More details can be had from http://www.technologyreview.in/computing/25206/. He delivered a TED lecture in the TED conference at Mysore.

Challenges in Mega Project – Fast Breeder Reactor by Dr Chellapandi

This one went totally outside my head. The scale of the project is Rs 5000 crores and the project is expected to complete by 2050 and is expect to generate 500gw of power. I guess I cannot absorb such complexity and I am sure I would be dead by 2050! Only thing I could realize is people with such vision keep doing what they are supposed to do without any need for any kind of appreciation. I can see only the speaker being internalized and drives sheer strength from within and knows exactly what he is talking about.

Conclusion

The high light of the conference was that the entire conference up held the spirit of volunteer ship and all the people who were behind the show had a full time job. They managed to deliver this conference working on weekends over the last six months and they have been doing over the past five years without fail.  I guess they can go in for a CMM level 5 certification as well! Also the underlying thread which was spoken with modesty was with 400 million people below the age of 30 who could or probably would lead the country to greater heights in the coming years. Interestingly the conference began with Vijay Paul saying

asato ma sadgamaya
tamaso ma jyotirgamaya
mrtyorma amrtam gamaya

This translates roughly to

Lead me from the asat to the sat.
Lead me from darkness to light.
Lead me from death to immortality

Whatever happens, the foundations are intact!

Stay Tuned and Have Fun

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Patrick Lencioni

The concepts were presented with a story line it was an easy read and what follows are the brief summary of the concepts minus the story line.  Please note that it would be easy to dismiss the five dysfunctions stated here as sheer ‘common sense’ but don’t we all agree ‘common sense’ is NOT so ‘common’.

The five dysfunctions are represented below as a pyramid and the first dysfunction starts at the bottom of the pyramid and gradually gives rise to the fifth dysfunction, which is at the top of the pyramid.

The Five Dysfunctions

Absence of Trust

Trust is the foundation on any significant relationships are built, nurtured and enriched. We could debate endlessly on what constitutes trust or the absence of it. In other words how do we measure ‘trust’ or the absence of ‘it’. It is not that hard but generally it is. It is simply the ability to state ‘look folks – I am s***wing up. Can you help me’. It is the ability to express vulnerability without any element of insecurity or prejudice. The absence of trust leads to the second dysfunction.

Fear of Conflict

Much progress in any kind of social setup depends on healthy debate on contrasting views. It is simply the ability to debate our ideas passionately and see reason in choosing one out of many ideas. Everyone one would probably recall the famous sequence in the movie ‘”Good, Bad, Ugly” “If you have to shoot, shoot. Do not talk”. The measure is simply to ask ourselves ‘Are we able to state what we really feel’ or ‘are we suppressing our emotions’? There has to be a ‘storm’ before the calm. The absence of conflict leads to the third dysfunction.

Lack of Commitment

Well it is the dreaded ‘C’ word. It is simply the ability to ‘deliver on our promises’. It could be as simple as coming to a meeting in the ‘stated’ time or as complex as meeting an important ‘Delivery Milestone’. The measure is simple. How many times we have answered directly ‘when asked’, ‘when something would be over’ and how many times have we stuck to what we have ‘stated’ if we did manage to state in the first place. We take so many things for granted in all spheres of life that even outside our professional space we do not stick to what we say.  The absence of commitment leads to the fourth dysfunction.

Avoidance of Accountability

Accountability or lack of it can be best explained by the story of ‘Everybody thought somebody’ will do it. I am not repeating that story here. It is simply the ability to ask our selves and our peers ‘why certain agreed upon thing was not done?’. The measure is ‘Do we even bother to ask our own selves or our peers’ when there is a failure to meet a stated ‘commitment’. The absence of accountability leads to the fifth dysfunction.

Inattention to Results

This is the stage where goal displacement and goal in-congruence occur. It is a stage where individual priorities have overridden team priorities and there is an absence of working towards realizing a ‘common goal’. At this stage teams are insensitive towards what could be termed as ‘Getting the rubber on the road’.

I hope the above gives an introduction to the well written book. The book has some interesting exercises that you can try out on your teams and you would be probably surprised with the results.

Get the real stuff  from the following link
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (J-B Lencioni Series)

Stay Tuned and Have Fun.

I wonder why, I wonder how,

You approach a traffic signal which is yellow; it always turns to red and never to green.

Despite making one thousand train journeys you never make one lasting friendship in the train journeys and that too if you were one from the KB (K Balachander) inspired generations of Rail Sneham (Train Friendship), it is even more frustrating!

Whenever you get a lower berth allotted, there is always someone requesting you to move to some other berth.

90% of the time in flights, you get an equal sized person sitting next to you.

You do not get the person you want in phone at a six sigma precision especially when you need them most.

You get emergency show stoppers and frantic calls on a Friday evening.

Two equally good movies get played in different channels at the same time.

You generally get interrupted during the plot of a movie.

You do not get your favorite dish in your favorite restaurant especially when you have gone for it.

You remember the name of an old friend either before or after the interaction and never during it.

You are well in time for a flight and the flight always starts late.

You are five minutes late for a flight and the flight leaves in time.

You are in a hurry and you will never find the right change to pay the taxi/auto.

I wonder why, I wonder how.

But if you have grown up listening to “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans” or used to the philosophy of ‘Living in the present’

You begin to enjoy these and the many other similar things.

As for me I can enjoy all of the above, well almost, except the frantic and desperate search in the train journeys :). Well, blame it on KB.

Stay Tuned and Have Fun.