AGILE IN ACTION

At the Agile Evangelists Meetup last night, I said something like “we run with no known defects”. Thank you to Rick Vugteveen for asking me to clarify this. When we discover a defect we take steps to fix it as quickly as possible. It's a take on the Lean manufacturing concept of stop the line. We do this in two ways.

I've pulled together some data for the first year of a product stream we created and plotted it as charts for throughput, rework and effectiveness.

Without really thinking about it until now, I've been seeing two types of technical debt. The first is the quick solution implemented with dirty code. I consider this to be irresponsible. That's not to say I won't do it, just that if I decide I should do it I make sure the necessary people understand the consequences and that it's an irresponsible action to take.

In the Lean manufacturing world there's a measurement called First-Time-Through (FTT), which monitors whether a cell is making products right the first time. It's a measurement of the effectiveness of the cell's standardized work and shows the percentage of product made without any need for rework or scrap.

All our work items, both user-focused and technical, are stories framed in the context of a user interacting with the product. Each story represents a distinct, visible and testable piece of work that can be delivered independently to realize some value. Stories exist at many levels of specificity and never convey solutions. For example, at a point in time it's sufficient to use an ambiguous story to describe an interaction as simply an activity a user engages in using the product. At some time later, typically when detail starts to matter, smaller stories are written to describe that activity in terms of more specific tasks the user performs with the product.