Earlier this year Allan Kelly and I ran a workshop on agile/lean at Kingston University for the local BCS SPA group. Immo Hüneke, who invited us down there, has published an insightful write-up of the session, complete with photos (I’m the fat one in mid song).
October 28, 2008
Over at Evolving Excellence today Kevin Meyer describes his experiences of a visit to Toyota Kyushu. Kevin is struck dumb by every aspect of the plant’s operation — for example this: “Every movement is choreographed and improved. You have to stand and watch each person for several cycles to see just how choreographed. Each movement… [Read more…]
September 12, 2008
A few days ago I noted that Shigeo Shingo, one of the founders of lean manufacturing, once said that testing to find problems is waste, whereas testing to prevent problems is not. Today I’ve been helping out with configuring an instance of CruiseControl, one that runs three or four projects and checks that no-one has… [Read more…]
September 9, 2008
As usual, it takes me multiple attempts to figure out what I really want to say, and how to express myself. Here’s a bit more discussion of what I believe is implied by downstream testing: The very fact that downstream testing occurs, and is heavily consuming resources, means that management haven’t understood that such activity… [Read more…]
February 4, 2008
This week Wayne Allen is starting an experiment: one of his teams is going to drop the “traditional” agile approach of iterations and velocity, in favour of a kanban-style pull system with capped work in progress. The team will do no estimation, and the only metric for the department will be the average number of… [Read more…]
September 5, 2007
While catching up on my reading of lean blogs today I stumbled on a post by Jon Miller at Gemba Panta Rei, called Give Me 60 Minutes and I’ll Give You a Lean Transformation, in which Jon describes a very simple — and quite theatrical — means of driving improvement: “This exercise starts with picking… [Read more…]
August 14, 2007
This week I’ve come across a few articles that clicked together as I read them, and in so doing they reinforced one of my deepest beliefs about software development – or any other profession, for that matter. The articles were: Train Wreck Management by Mary Poppendieck, in which Mary chronicles the origins of “management” and… [Read more…]
August 5, 2007
John Brothers has posted the latest edition of the Carnival, entitled I’m running late. This is a perennial topic for all software development projects, and doubly so for those of us who take a lean or TOC view of productivity and change, so props to John for bringing that focus to the carnival this time… [Read more…]
July 10, 2007
In Lowering the Water Level Dan Markovitz over at Superfactory draws a sharp analogy between inventory levels in a factory and the time available to a knowledge worker: “Imagine a value stream or a production process as a river. Reducing the inventory in the process – “lowering the water level” – exposes the “rocks” that… [Read more…]
June 27, 2007
Hal Macomber is a lean construction consultant who is currently developing a responsibility-based planning approach for a firm that designs high-tech manufacturing plants. The resulting process will be a hybrid of lean’s Last Planner System with Scrum. And Hal is managing the development of that process using Scrum. He has even hired a ScrumMaster from… [Read more…]
I'm Kevin Rutherford, from Macclesfield in the UK. I'm an independent agile software coach and mentor, specialising in test-driven development, agile, lean and the theory of constraints.
May 18, 2009
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