Quite some years ago, after attending a presentation about lean production at Toyota, I decided to buy the book “The Toyota Way”. I had the feeling many of their 14 management principles would be applicable to professional services as well. I started reading the book, but never finished. Last weeks I read several posts about lean software development compared to another Agile working method: SCRUM. Honestly, despite the recent car issues that Toyota is facing, I feel both methods, or even a combination of these two, can help us deliver software in a better way.
Farewell IE6 even Google no longer supports you
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Is Lean software development better than Scrum?
CommentsSoftware is art, code is poetry
CommentsJust imagine yourself being the world famous painter Rembrandt van Rijn. Somebody hired you to prepare a nice painting of his company. Once you show him your almost finished painting, he requests you to remove a person and to move another one. And of course in his opinion this isn’t a big job.
Are you still there? How would you feel? Who’s the artist here? Who can decide whether something is easy or not?
How to make your clients Agile without teaching them?
CommentsAgile SCRUM defines the way how people should cooperate on the dialy basis. However, reality brings several situations where Agile rules are hard to use. How to handle such exceptions not destroying Agility in the team?
Projects are usually done in few phases. Like I described in this post, the delivery phase is usually the hardest to manage. Why? In reality, you get customer attention at the end of whole development process. This of course shouldn’t happen but… Life is life. How to manage such exceptions?
1. Have a good talk with your customer and construct the contract in such way that it will clearly state when changes in the software are allowed and when not. Also, when you notice lack of interest from the client side after providing to him sprints results, inform him that later changes will seriously influence the delivery date. This usually works.
2. If the second step won’t work, you can construct the contract in such way, that after each sprint, customer gets invoice. Of course not whole project cost, but the part that was made for him. This is just a trick that always works. Suddenly, next day customer is sending replies on old emails and checks your results very deeply. This is not the best solution for lack of response from the client side, but made in polite way, can bring only good things to the project.
What is most important! Customer attention and remarks while the product grows is the most important aspect of the whole Agile development approach.
Agile SCRUM defines the way how people should cooperate on the daily basis. However, in reality we are faced with situations where Agile rules are hard to use. How to handle such exceptions not destroying Agility in the team?
How we implemented SCRUM, lessons learned
CommentsIt’s been almost a year since we started implementing the Agile way of working by using SCRUM. During this time we have delivered several projects from very small to medium ones. Was it worth following this methodology? Is SCRUM really improving the way we deliver software? And what did we learn? Through this post we would like to share our experiences and lessons we lerarned. We are looking forward to receiving your feedback as well.
Agile development – advantages and disadvantages – Part 1
CommentsIn GOYELLO we are always trying to use all the best tools and practices available. Currently, we are evaluating the Agile methodology with the SCRUM’s, sprints and all other things related to it. This post opens the series of short articles about Agile and how I am experiencing it. Let’s start!
