Lean Development for Lean Times

Yesterday I went to Agile Vancouver’s Lean Development for Lean Times event.  It was a series of three speakers talking about different aspects of using lean with agile methodologies.

Katherine Radeka talked about lean product development, although I’d say the session crossed over into some more generic lean concepts, as well as discussing the cross-over from lean manufacturing to lean software development.  There were some interesting ideas, but nothing earth-shattering for me, anyway.  The best thing I took away from this was the idea of waste versus necessary waste.  It’s a good way to think about some of those things which your customers don’t value, but you really have to do anyway.

Eric Ries was by far the star of the day for me.  He’s an engaging speaker and I enjoyed learning about how he runs development in his business (the topic was lean start-ups) — definitely very lean and very agile.  He uses continuous deployment to promote changes to production within 20 minutes, and has an ‘immune’ system which monitors how those changes impact users’ behavior so that bad ideas can be rolled back quickly.  Well beyond what I’d ever need at my company, but I got some good ideas for improving things, and got a glimpse of what’s possible.

Last up for the day was Corey Ladas,  who talked about Scrum-ban, which is basically applying lean principles to Scrum.  Again with this talk I got some excellent ideas for refining our Scrum process to eliminate waste and refine our processes.  I do think, though, that many of the concepts he presented would only be appropriate for a high-performing Scrum team within an organization with a reasonable level of maturity around agile concepts.  Good ideas, but if I were to roll some of them out here, I think alot of things would break.

Overall a great event from Agile Vancouver, especially for $25.