In your current job, can you identify: Five regular activities that contribute value towards your organisation’s goal? Five regular activities that do not contribute value towards the goal?
May 26, 2008
Clarke asked me to explain my earlier throw-away remark that YAGNI forms part of the EXPLOIT step in moving the bottleneck away from development, so here goes… YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It) is an exhortation from the early days of XP. It has been discussed and misunderstood a great deal, so I’m not going… [Read more…]
September 11, 2007
My apologies if this has been said or written a thousand times before: YAGNI is XP’s way of exploiting the constraint. Which means that XP, and hence most agile methods, are set up on the assumption that the development team is – or soon will be – the bottleneck. And having identified that bottleneck, our… [Read more…]
August 31, 2007
The more I think about it, the more astonished I become. Maintenance contracts for (bespoke) software: Buying insurance to cover against the possibility that the software doesn’t work. I know the consumer electronics industry does the same, and I always baulk at the idea of spending an extra fifty quid in case the manufacturer cocked… [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 25, 2007
Back in May’s Carnival of the Agilists I referenced a post by Clarke Ching in which he suggests we can learn a lot about variation in a complex process by simply flipping coins. When I tried the simulation a few times with Excel I found, as expected, that heads and tails don’t always occur in… [Read more…]
June 15, 2007
Kevin Fox has begun a new blog, on which he plans to share real-life success stories of applying the theory of constraints. With over 20 years working with Eli Goldratt on his CV, Kevin should have plenty of great case studies to share. The first story tells of the development of a new drug by… [Read more…]
June 4, 2007
Henrik Mårtensson's concept of "DIP" (design-in-process) can give a useful measure of the investment we have to write off when requirements change before release
May 30, 2006
Rami Goldratt's paper describing his improved version of the transition tree is now available in English; download the PDF document here
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.
January 6, 2009
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