Dr. Ivar Jacobson was invited to present the keynote at this year’s TUP conference held on December 10, 2011, in Beijing, China. TUP (Technology/User Experience/Product) includes a series of events hosted by CSDN, the biggest IT community in China. The speakers invited for these events are famous IT experts; and attendees are IT and management people who are interested in IT product development.  I was very pleased to present lean and agile development sessions along with Dr. PanWei Ng at the conference. With three IJI members presenting it became an IJI day at TUP 2011.

Dr. Jacobson presented “Liberating the Essence from the Burden of the Whole: A Renaissance in Lean Thinking”. Ivar’s lively and engaging session clearly demonstrated to attendees the new reasoning around lean and that to stay lean you need to stay lean from the beginning of a project rather than trying to eliminate waste later.  By presenting three case studies representing business, software product and process method, Ivar demonstrated the concept of a “kernel” --representing the essence of something as a good starting point for most things you build.  You start lean and you stay lean throughout the life of what you build. 

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The 6th annual Agile China was held in Beijing from September 1 – 3, 2011. Agile China is a summit of agile world enthusiasts gathering in China. For the past five years, it’s attracted world-class agile experts, such as Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Dave Thomas, James Grenning, and Mary Poppendieck et al, and tens of  thousands of attendees across China and overseas. It represents the highest level of development and adoption of agile development in China.

This year’s conference proved to be another successful event. The three-day event was packed by some 700 attendees. The conference was opened by Mr. Wang Jun, General Secretary of China System and Software Process Improvement Association, the host of the conference, and keynote by Linda Rising, the authour of “Fearless Change”, followed by parallel sessions on agile training camp, agile new trend, and agile testing and quality control. People gathered to share their experience and to explore new ideas and  trends. The conference atmosphere was full of energy and excitement. Particularly, I truly enjoyed the free style of discussions and presentations – in a real agile spirit. Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous kernel journals we have explored the value that development organizations can get from a process kernel that codifies what each and every project always has to do, in a way that is distinct and separate from how different project teams might choose to go about doing it, some benefits being:

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We have seen in the previous kernel journals that a process kernel, defined in terms of the key domain entities, or Alphas, and their value state progressions, can give us a simple, shared view of what each and every project has to achieve (which is common across all projects), that is distinct and separate from how they might go about doing it (which may vary from project to project).

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Bij IJI staan we een practice-gedreven aanpak voor. Zoals met veel concepten en principes geldt ook hier dat een goed begrip van wat ermee wordt bedoeld essentieel is om er echt de vruchten van te plukken. Een manier om daar invulling aan te geven is om te kijken naar criteria waaraan je een goede practice kunt herkennen. Maar voor we dat doen, is het goed om eerst te kijken naar de definitie en kenmerken van een practice en een practice-gedreven aanpak.

Onder een practice-gedreven aanpak verstaan we onder meer “het samenstellen van een effectieve manier van werken op basis van relevante procescomponenten”. In plaats van moeizaam te proberen een procesraamwerk toe te snijden op een specifiek project draaien we het om; we selecteren alleen relevante procescomponenten en assembleren die tot een consistent proces. En zo’n procescomponent noemen we dan een practice. Use Cases, User Stories en Iteratief ontwikkelen zijn enkele voorbeelden van practices. Andere voorbeelden zijn Operationaliseren Systeem en Datamigratie. In deze context is het ultieme doel van een practice-gedreven aanpak “betere resultaten boeken met softwareontwikkeling”. Hierbij kun je dan denken aan betere software, goedkoper, sneller en een prettigere manier van werken. Read the rest of this entry »

We all know that we want to “cut to the chase” as soon as we can and start incrementally developing the software product through which we deliver value back to the business. But we also know that there are certain essential pre-requisites to “sprinting”, such as some kind of vision of where we are supposed to be going and the right team and tools to get us there. If we start motoring before we are ready we may head off in the wrong direction or we may find that the wheels come off as we accelerate through the gears. Read the rest of this entry »

The kernel Alphas are the core, key, critical, central, essential conceptual entities that we need to manage and progress in a controlled way in order to ensure a successful outcome for our project. But, like all concepts, they have the distinct disadvantage of being invisible. A project manager is convinced that his project is important and that managing its progression to a successful conclusion is critical. But if, as an outside assessor, I were to say “bring me this project of which you speak so that I may gaze upon it and assess its status” he would be stumped. He can show me plans, people, documents, but he can’t show me “the project”. These key concepts are the elephants in the room that no one can see because …  well , because they are invisible. To be useful, they need to be made visible and real, so normal people can interact with them.

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Many organizations have achieved a degree of process maturity (reliability, discipline, consistency) only by paying a very heavy price – they have become addicted to documents and document templates.

Unfortunately, it can happen all too easily. Most processes end up being document-centric even though they never set out to be so. They start by offering useful process guidance on how to progress the project in a controlled way, in the form of a set of activities, each of which is defined in terms of the artifacts it produces. Most artifacts are documents of some kind and the process helpfully comes with templates for each document – a template is better than having to start with a blank sheet of paper, after all. The project milestones we need to pass through are evidenced using the documents, and the whole thing hangs together nicely. Read the rest of this entry »

We in the software development industry face a seemingly intractable problem. We have learnt the lesson that prescriptive process is a bad thing. Process bureaucrats sitting in ivory method towers, telling highly-skilled professionals how to do their job and setting the process police on them if they don’t follow their instructions to the letter, can (unsurprisingly) be really quite damaging. It disempowers the development team  and engrains apathetic attitudes along the lines of “When we inevitably under-deliver, it will not be our fault, but the fault of these ludicrous process hoops that we are forced to jump through, instead of being able to focus on writing great software”.  The agile revolution was software engineering’s way of learning this lesson, and the agile manifesto pledge to value “people over process” and “software over documentation” has got to be right. But (… there was always a “but” coming …), we are already finding that the opposite extreme of little or no explicit process isn’t going to cut it either, because it leaves too many problems unsolved, such as: Read the rest of this entry »