Some thoughts that popped up on my first day of attending our Poppendieck course on 23th of June.

Knowledge inventory

The concept of “Zero Inventory” is not desirable and in fact does not hold in Toyota (go to the production plant and notice the trucks on the park yard outside the factory with inventory waiting to load it into the factory – the drivers are sleeping some times), its all about having the correct amount of inventory.
So! Mary keeps a log book containing what programs she installed on her laptop and what problems she experienced (hope she doesn't mind me telling this in public). When there is a problem on the laptop, she goes to look into the log book instead of googling it again spending time on finding the same site as 6 months ago, wasting time on finding already acquired knowledge – relearning, which is waste.  
Well. This log book is knowledge inventory. Knowledge that we keep close to us, ready to use, but it takes up space and the more we have, the more difficult it is to find the knowledge we need. In software we do not have physical inventory, like wheels ready put on a car in a car factory plant, but we have knowledge inventory. So how do we produce the correct amount of knowledge inventory?

Knowledge briefs

Lets go to the source. When we make knowledge and put it into our repository (perhaps a wiki), we should make the knowledge condense, then it is easier to find - and use. But it is difficult to make knowledge brief! If I make a four page documentation of a feature, and come back six months later, I will spend time  

Because knowledge in wikis are knowledge inventory, and tend to grow and grow. Too much get a burden, you cannot find things and when you find a document, its four pages long and the valuable knowledge is hidden in a lot of irrelevant noise. (Can search engines solve the problem of finding useful knowledge in a split second on the internet? I don't think so.)

So what about a wiki that have limited space? You can only put 2400 characters on a page, because if you put on more, you build up too much knowledge inventory. “If you cannot fit your knowledge into an A3, use an A4”. Constrain yourself to condense it even more – extract the important parts e.g. the exceptions in the business case that you only found out about later, and spent time on trying to grasp.  

I want to make an exercise on our next workshop to practice the art of making knowledge brief, to avoid building up knowledge inventory.
And last thoughts: Are knowledge always written? Can you build condensed knowledge in pictures and graphs?

By Jesper Thaning

Will Agile Software Development end on the dumping grounds of History? This June Mary Poppendieck will present her view on how the move to agile software development, needs to be done cautiously to avoid repeating the mistakes the IT industry has previously encountered while adopting new methodologies and paradigms.

June 23th and 24th, BestBrains is arranging a 2-day Lean Software Development course in Copenhagen with lean software pioneers Mary and Tom Poppendieck. In connection with this course we have also arranged a free lecture June 24th, at danish IT-Universitetet. Mary and Tom are well-acclaimed authors of the popular books "Lean Software Development" and "Implementing Lean Software Development", which describes how to use Lean principles to improve software development organizations.

See more about the comprehensive 2-day course here (or in danish here), and the free lecture at ITU here.

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

By Sune Gynthersen

Yesterday Jesper and I was doing an agile workshop as part of the Öresund Agile 2008 conference in Malmö, Sweden. I have to admit we had set out being pretty ambitious about the content of the workshop. We stuffed everything from Release planning, charting, coding, test-driving, continuously integrating, doing reviews, retrospectives, scrum meetings, planning poker, and discussing engineering practices and process improvement into just one day. I think we can conclude the workshop fully lived up to it's name -- Accelerated Agile!

With Malmö filled with swedish football fans, students celebrating final exams, and of course a lot of skilled people from the agile software community, we had some great days. Not only was it cool doing the workshop itself, but being at a smaller software conference where you actually get a chance to chat with most of the attendees I think is really valuable. I hope everyone else enjoyed it as much as we did (in time the feedback forms will tell!).

As promised during the workshop, we have of course put the latest (and hopefully greatest) version of all the slides online. You can download them from here.

After browsing through the pictures that was taken during the day, I selected some that you'll find below.

Notice the red and green lava lamps in the background. These were controlled by the CruiseControl CI server! I personally think that this was actually more than just a gadget. It brought great visiblity into the project. With these lamps connected to the build system, everyone who entered the conference room (or even looked through the door) could immediately spot if there was currently a problem. Now that is TRULY surfacing problems fast!

The self-organizing team working towards a common goal?

Some laid back discussions of interesting engineering practices.

Our one-day iteration ended with a retrospective, that judging from the smiles were rather positive.

All sorts of important stuff on the wall. Tasks, burn-down, WIP chart, and standard work sheets.

A big thanks to all the dedicated attendees, conference coordinator Gustav Bergman from Softhouse who invited us in the first place, and also Sonny, Lars and Thomas Lundström who assisted us during the entire day!

By Sune Gynthersen