AGILE IN ACTION

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.

Steve Freeman brought David Anderson along to see us at a client a few weeks ago. It was great to have the likes of Steve and David come see what we're getting up to, listen to some of the ideas we're pursuing and give us some feedback. David has said some nice things to say about his visit.

A team's velocity is the sum of the estimates of the user stories that were done during the iteration.

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.

Defects are waste. User stories with known defects aren't done and can't be released, they're partially complete work or inventory, and they are waste too. If you're using a defect tracking tool you're queuing up waste and you're inspecting for quality after the code's been written. Eliminate waste . Avoid queues because they prevent throughput of released software and block the flow of value to the customer. Build quality into the code from the start by fixing defects as you go. To help improve the quality of code, developers should use test-driven development and testers should perform exploratory testing as developers complete vertical slices of user stories . If a defect is found, stop the line and fix it immediately. Don't queue it up.

Before adding more people to a project team to accelerate delivery be sure you have realistic expectations about the effect. Measure the impact of learning curve and management overhead and be sure that the increase in productivity is worth the additional expense.