AGILE IN ACTION

When people are pooled in specialized silos more process is required to get things done. Responsibility gets diffused and transaction and coordination costs go up because there are more handovers and sign-offs as work is passed around; more meetings are needed to keep people involved and informed, and it's more difficult to gather people together; it's more time consuming to chase people for responses. Work is stop-start. There's little flow and lots of waste.

Myron Tribus said:

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.

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.

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.