Kanban
Friday starts off with Corey Ladas’ “Starting a Kanban System for Software Engineering with Value Stream Maps and Theory of Constraints“. The talk contains practical techniques and steps to move to a more Lean, flowing software development system. Typical issues are highlighted. Many of the techniques are familiar to me and I’ve seen almost all of the techniques in use. Teams at different levels of maturity use different techniques. The important thing is to constantly strive to to better, to reduce cycle time. Corey recommends cumulative flow diagrams to quickly highlight problems.
There are some questions about the apparent conflict between reducing waste and increasing flow on the one hand with prioritizing to maximize value delivered. Not every story has the same value, unlike the production environments where flow originated. Aha! A conflict. Can we dissolve it with a Conflict Resolution Diagram?
Read more at Corey Ladas’ blog.
I attended the very insightful session, too.
About a conflict resolution diagram, I once draw one in an article of Kanban.
http://www.infoq.com/articles/hiranabe-lean-agile-kanban
see figure 9.