
Agile from a Lean Perspective
How would you think about decision-making and Lean by taking another look at the Agile Manifesto?
Influencing Behaviour. Secondary Factor.
Working in small batches is one of a set of capabilities that drive higher software delivery and organisational performance.
Working in small batches is an essential principle in any discipline where feedback loops are important, or you want to learn quickly from your decisions. Working in small batches allows you to rapidly test hypotheses about whether a particular improvement is likely to have the effect you want, and if not, lets you course correct or revisit assumptions. Although this article applies to any type of change that includes organisational transformation and process improvement, it focuses primarily on software delivery.
Working in small batches is part of lean product management. Together with capabilities like visibility of work in the value stream, team experimentation, and visibility into customer feedback, working in small batches predicts software delivery performance and organisational performance.
Traditional project teams work is done in large batches is because of the large fixed cost of handing off changes. In traditional phased approaches to software development, handoffs from development to test or from test to IT operations consist of whole releases: months worth of work by teams consisting of tens or hundreds of people. With this traditional approach, collecting feedback on a change can take many months.
In contrast, agile team practices, which utilise cross-functional teams and lightweight approaches, allow for software to progress from development through test and operations into production in a matter of minutes. However, this rapid progression requires software teams to work with code in small batches.
Working in small batches has many benefits:
Source: Google Cloud Architecture Centre
How would you think about decision-making and Lean by taking another look at the Agile Manifesto?
Optimise flow of work through upgrading the team’s visual board to Kanban
How do you slice Product Backlog items so that they can be delivered in a single Sprint?
Learn to improve ‘overburdenning’ the team and its members to increase throughput of work.
How do you slice Product Backlog items so that they can be delivered in a single Sprint?
How do you stop Stories from “rolling” over to the next Sprint?
The three Cs format is the simplest way for teams to turn traditional requirements into good User Stories
Learn the basics of value stream mapping with Helen Beal, industry leader in DevOps evolution, who explains how value stream mapping.
Learn how to work in a continual state of cross-functional flow
Cost of Delay is the impact, financial or even risk, to value for a customer and to business.
Yuval Yeret answers questions on flows inside and outside Scrum from a Lean and Kanban perspective
What is Kanban? Is it more than just post-it notes on a wall? Is it a conspiracy to sell sharpies? Aren’t there apps we can use instead?