Tag Archives: Lean

Recorded Webcasts

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We’ve made our last two Webinars available for playback at your convenience.

  • Death to Manual Deployments: Manual deployments are slow, inconsistent and fail in production. Other than that, they’re fine. Listen to Jeffery Fredrick and Eric Minick as they discuss what’s wrong with Manual Deployments, why Automated Deployments are better and best practices for building on automation.
  • Build and Deployment Automation for the Lean Economy: Teams today are challenged by the need to get much more done without dramatically increasing headcount. Join Jeffery and Eric as they share techniques for applying tools from Lean manufacturing to the build and deployment processes.

Going Lean: Deferring Commitment

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Lean teams will defer commitment on high risk decisions. Generally this means that instead of putting a lot of time and effort into making sure they make early, risky decisions correctly, they avoid the high cost of incorrect decisions by finding ways to defer making the commitment.

An Example from Development

Applications teams can benefit from delaying some large architectural decisions. For instance, by taking a standards based approach, they might delay the need to select the message broker used by their communication systems. Instead they might develop with the messaging layer abstracted so that several brokers would be compatible with the system and could be benchmarked as the system matured and its needs became more clear. This way the development team doesn’t end up making a bad, expensive decision early in the process when they know the least about their needs. Instead, they keep their options open at the cost of adding an abstraction layer. Continue reading →

Q&A From the Beyond Agile Processes – A Lean ALM Strategy Webinar

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We recently cohosted a Webinar on Lean processes with our friends from AccuRev. Analysts from Forrester discussed trends in the market, and how companies are applying Lean principals to find efficiencies in their development and release efforts. The webinar was fantastic and we had more questions than we could get to live. Here are some of the questions that came back in to us that we wanted to answer or expand on.

Q: Setting up all that automation seems pretty intimidating when in the throes of projects.  How much setup time is usually required for a standard .Net/Windows environment?

A: Automating does require effort. However, usually when the team has a little while to breath it can dedicate someone to automate the parts of their process that are the most wasteful. Once that’s done, the time that was spent on those processes, can be fed back into the automation loop to build out a robust system. Usually teams can get some benefit back after a couple weeks (sometimes a couple hours) that can start this cycle. Continue reading →