Quotes from David J. Anderson

There are two things I enjoy most about my work. First, I get to work with interesting and enthusiastic people who are also fired up about science. Second, every once in a while I have moments in which I suddenly understand the solution to a problem that I've been working on - those are great moments.

The physical board had a huge psychological effect compared to anything we got from the electronic tracking tool we used at Microsoft. By attending the standup each day, team members were exposed to a sort of time-lapse photography of the flow of work across the board. Blocked work items were marked with pink tickets, and the team became much more focused on issue resolution and maintaining flow. Productivity jumped dramatically.

As the population of software developers ages, they care more about the rest of their lives. Many lament wasting their twenties locked up in an office slaving over a piece of code that failed to reach market expectations and became obsolete soon after release. Work/life

Providing a good work/life balance will make your company a more attractive employer in your local market.

Investors and senior managers all too often take the view that resources are fungible and easily replaced.

It's good business to provide a good work/life balance by never overloading your teams.

if there is no explicit limit to work-in-progress and no signaling to pull new work through the system, it is not a kanban system.

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a "sustainable pace"?

You need slack to enable continuous improvement. You need to balance demand against throughput and limit the quantity of work-in-progress to enable slack.

There should be no grand, centralized choice made in the ivory tower. The minor cost-efficient advantage of the whole staff being trained in one method is far outweighed by the problems created—and the real cost, in ROI terms—by using the wrong process for the job.

Put simply, excessive defects are the biggest waste in software development

encourage teams to inspect code every day for at least 30 minutes.

Reducing the quantity of design-in-progress boosts software quality.

Cumulative Flow Diagram

David, we have been around your building and we've seven kanban boards. Each one is different! Each team is following a different process! How can you possibly cope with this complexity?' My answer was always a dismissive 'of course! Each team's situation is different.

The essence of starting with Kanban is to change as little as possible. You must resist the temptation to change workflow, job titles, roles and responsibilities, and specific working practices.

Agile values ask us to make progress with imperfect information and to rework later as we learn more. Lean Product Development teaches us to understand the cost of delay and to recognize that earlier, faster progress to a partial solution is often better than delaying to acquire better information leading to a more complete solution.

Drum-Buffer-Rope pull system

The Value of Kanban is Counter-Intuitive

Greenhopper for Jira

I like solving problems, and science provides a logical way of solving real-life problems.

Becoming a bird ecologist was just luck! I had the chance to be a field assistant for a scientist working in the Galapagos Islands, and while I was there, I saw a particular problem in behavioral biology that I wanted to solve and, in the process, made myself into a bird ecologist.

Successful ecologists are successful in part because they have prepared their minds to attack scientific problems using a variety of intellectual tools.

Without slack there is no tactical agility in the business.