Sprint 2: Lean

1. About this Sprint
2. Sprint Goals
3. Readings
4. Experiential Learning
5. Sprint Acceptance Tests

1 About this Sprint

This sprint introduces Lean and the Lean mindset

2 Sprint Goals

Lean: The student will be familiar with the overall mindset of Lean Software Development, and in particular the identification of software development wastes.

3 Readings

3.1 Book Chapters

M. Cohn “Succeeding with Agile”, chapters 5-9

3.2 Screencasts

3.3 Articles

Definition of Waste. [Power & Conboy 2014] Ken Power, Kieran Conboy: Impediments to Flow: Rethinking the Lean Concept of ‘Waste’ in Modern Software Development. XP 2014, pp. 203-217.

Waste identification. [Petersen & Wohlin 2011] Petersen K., Wohlin C.: Measurinig the Flow of Lean Software Development, Software: Practice and Experience; vol. 41 no. 9; 2011.

Waste identification. [Petersen et al. 2014] Petersen K., Roos P., Nyström S., Runeson P.;Early Identification of Bottlenecks in Very Large scale System of Systems Software Development, accepted for publication in Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 2014.

3.4 Further Reading Optional

Agile Practices. [Williams 2012 (table 2)] L. Williams, What agile teams think of agile principles, Commun. ACM, vol. 55, issue 4, pp. 71-76, 2012.

Agile Practices. [Kurapati 2012 (figure 1)] Narendra Kurapati, Venkata Sarath Chandra Manyam, Kai Petersen: Agile Software Development Practice Adoption Survey. XP 2012, pp.16-30.

Lean Practices. [Cawley et al. 2013] Oisín Cawley, Xiaofeng Wang, Ita Richardson: Lean Software Development - What Exactly Are We Talking About? LESS 2013, pp.16-31.

Root Cause Analysis Method. [Lehtinen et al. 2011] Timo O. A. Lehtinen, Mika Mäntylä, Jari Vanhanen: Development and evaluation of a lightweight root cause analysis method (ARCA method) - Field studies at four software companies. Information & Software Technology 53(10): 1045-1061 (2011).

4 Experiential Learning

4.1 Introduction

Moving on from the current process, the next step is usually to identify the wastes in this process. Once the wastes are identified and prioritised, you can impose changes to the current process and see how these changes address the root causes for your wastes.

The intention of this assignment is to use tools from the Lean toolset to understand where the current wastes are, and how to change your current process such that you are able to continuously identify wastes. This is a precursor to subsequent assignments, where you impose different frameworks and study their impact on your identified wastes.

Please note that depending on your choice of process to model previously, you may need to go outside your mapped process in order to do a meaningful investigation.

4.2 TODO Waste Identification using VSM

4.2.1 Tasks

Based on your previously constructed VSM, please Reflect on the different activities and the associated measures.

Which of them are value-adding,
which of them are non-value-adding but required, and
which of them are “just” non-value-adding?

List the wastes that you thus observe. Describe why you consider these to be wastes, in relation to the values you identified as being important.

Prioritise, with motivation, the wastes so that you know which is most important to address first.

4.2.2 Scope and Level of Depth

You may need to “open up” activities in your VSM that contribute a significant amount of waste to the overall flow, in order to get a complete understanding of what is really going on. If, for example, a particular activity contribute more than 10-20% of the overall waste, it may in fact consist of several sub-activities that should be further studied.

4.2.3 Delivery

Deliver your assignment via e-mail as a written report or a well-annotated set of presentation slides to the course managers.

4.3 TODO Using Kanban for Process Tracking

4.3.1 Tasks

Based on your previously constructed VSM, please investigate the following:

Describe a detailed example of how to use Kanban to track the status of your requirements/user stories.

What will you include in your Kanban?
At what points in your process will you collect the necessary information?
At what points in your process will a work task change states in your Kanban?
How can you use this to measure progress?

Describe a detailed example of how you plan to measure your velocity.

Provide an example of a cumulative flow chart, and describe what can be seen.
How will you use your measured velocity for planning in the future?

Describe how you can use Kanban not only as a project tracking tool, but also to drive the work forward. Please explain how this would effect your original VSM process and the identified wastes.

4.3.2 Delivery