Recently, there's been a Google-related discussion going on in the XP mailing list; that reminded me of something Mary said in one of her talks at Agile 2006....
What if, the pet projects people end up working on are tools to make their own lives easier? Or play with a design ideas? Or create a nifty framework? Or...
... I've read a few Google blogs in the last few months and the 20% thing seems a little dubious. I read one blog this week were the Googler said "They take...
Hello allan, thank you for the email quoted here. On Thursday, ... I've often seen these systems done with several columns on the wall, indicating things like ...
Hi Ron, ... I'm currently working with a project where history dictated we introduce several wait states on the board: - defects waiting to be fixed - fixes...
I like the Kanban approach, and I think it brings the visibility into clear view. However in my case half of my development and most of my QA groups are in a...
... that Google's policy of letting people spend 20% of their time pursuing pet projects actually helps their productivity. I'm a manager of a software team;...
... That's probably what would happen. I have one or two projects like that that I'd like to get around to doing... ... I guess I'm a bit dubious the utility...
Hi David, I lived with the 3M 15% time for two decades. Here are a couple of things to note about how it actually worked in practice: 1. The 15% rule...
I'm afraid I don't have time to make a complete answer but when you look for bottlenecks you should do two things: 1) pay attention to "optimizing the whole" ...
... Yeah, that's what we're doing now. ... That's an interesting idea: it will help give visibility into what other groups are causing us to work at less than...
Mel, Rally Software Development is in more or less the same position that you are - they have to churn out software. They used to have development cycles of ...
... Yup. ... I suspect that we have a product management bottleneck. I think we're probably covering that up by guessing more often than we should what's the...
David - The lesson for queuing theory is not really about the good things that can be accomplished by applying the slack time. Rather the lesson is that if ...
... Well, in our case there are two answers. The project I've been product managing was a web app so once we completed an iteration we released. Every two...
... the second week? Instead of shortening the development cycle, they started something they call 'hack-a-thon'. After 6 weeks of development and one week...
... I am increasingly of the opinion that as developer tools and techniques have improved the bottleneck for the whole industry has moved from the development...
David - Over a decade ago, when Jeff Sutherland invented Scrum, he was faced with a situation in which his product development process bottleneck was the ...
You know what the highest value short term thing is perhaps....we still leverage lots of internal tools that we developed with free time play, they increase...
Question for anyone who read the whole thread (I was busy!): Has anyone suggested "ask everyone where they think the bottleneck is"? Put another way, if a...
It may not make a sound but it will still be a bottleneck. It's not that people don't notice them, it's that they often think they are a necessary part of the...
... Huh. Interesting. One of the difficulties in applying that to our situation: we don't have regular releases in which we can consider a cycle like that....
... Yup. That's what I was trying to hint at with the 'lightly' part. ... Yeah, I like that article. One nice thing about work recently is that we've had...
... Huh. I'd never thought of Scrum (or agile methods in general) in that way. Neat. ... That's a very interesting dichotomy. And the consequences could ...
David - Chapter 4 of Implementing Lean Software Development talks about waste and how to construct and use Value Stream Maps to find waste. Notation or format...
