Wednesday, 30 April 2008
People do pair-programming
Posted by Simon Baker
On the whole our team is pretty good at pair programming. Our promiscuity is ramping up nicely and we're now using the concept of rolling story ownership. It works like this: At the daily standup, when a new story is brought into play, someone will volunteer to own it. Another person will volunteer to pair on that card. They'll work on the story until the next pair-swap at which point the owner moves off the story passing ownership to his partner and a new volunteer steps in to pair. The same thing happens at the next swap and so on. Ownership of the card passes to the partner and a new person comes in to pair. The person owning the story when it's done is responsible for demonstrating the story at the showcase.
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Comments: 2
Saturday, 19 April 2008
Where's the money?
Posted by Simon Baker
There's a company that makes shirts for men and women using one cloth-cutting machine and one sewing machine. The manufacturing sequence is the same. A single women's shirt is cut in 2 minutes, sewn in 15 minutes, requires fabric costing £45 and sells for £105. A single men' s shirt is cut in 10 minutes, sewn in 10 minutes, requires fabric costing £50 and sells for £100. The market's weekly demand is 120 women's shirts and 120 men's shirts.
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Comments: 1
Sunday, 13 April 2008
Challenges for the Product Stream concept
Posted by Simon Baker
The product stream concept is a simple one. A product stream contains a self-organizing team and a product owner, yet it engages with the Business more deeply than just having business representation in the Product Owner. Engagement is the wrong word, I suppose, because it's more than that. Software development is absorbed back into the Business. It's no longer just aligned, it's integrated; it's part of the business.
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Comments: 5
Sunday, 6 April 2008
Product streams are skills-based and product-oriented businesses
Posted by Simon Baker
There's lots of talk about aligning Information Technology with the Business. Apparently, it's the number one goal for CIOs. Information Technology is a big field so I'm going to focus on software product development.
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Saturday, 5 April 2008
Create value by focusing on end-users
Posted by Simon Baker
What's valuable to a business? At the end of the day, the goal of every company is to make money. So, ultimately, a business values things that make it money. We should always do our utmost to deliver value to our business by giving it the things that will help it make money from its customers. But focusing directly on business value is not good idea. Making money is most definitely the goal but focus must be on the source of revenue - the customers or end-users. If a business focuses on the money it eventually does wrong by its customers and they go away and it makes less money.
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