Any organization that produces software can only realize value from that software if it is consistently available to its users. The movement that is now known as DevOps, which emphasizes that Development and Operations are equal partners, rather than siloed organizational functions, started to coalesce in 2009, when Patrick Debois founded and organized the first...Read More

Organizational decision-makers can benefit from taking lessons from other disciplines, such as complexity science and systems theory. Using the Cynefin Framework, or “Cynefin” for short,  leaders can determine which organizational context they are in, so that they can make better decisions and avoid problems that might arise if they continue with “business as usual.” Dave...Read More

In knowledge work, and also in work contexts such as manufacturing, it is desirable for work items to pass smoothly through a series of steps and stages on their way to completion. Flow is a Lean term that describes that movement of work items. In any Lean system, it is desirable for the movement of...Read More

In Lean systems, it is important to identify the maximum number of items allowable in each stage of a workflow. Since work at any stage before completion does not provide actual value, having too much Work In Progress (WIP) can be an expensive proposition. Setting a WIP Limit helps ensure that there is a smooth...Read More

In Lean systems, an important metric is how many work items are in an unfinished state. In Lean Manufacturing, it is particularly common to see Work In Progress (WIP) in use, where work items pass through what is often a complex series of steps on their way to completion. In knowledge work such as software...Read More

In Lean Systems, it is important to identify the most important factor that slows down work in a system (a “bottleneck”), adjust it, and continue the same process with the next-most-impactful bottleneck. Eliyahu M. Goldratt describes this concept, the Theory of Constraints, in the book The Goal. The original context for this concept was in...Read More

In many organizational contexts, there are workers whose main contribution is the application of knowledge, as opposed to performing manual labor. A common term for such employees is “knowledge workers.” Knowledge workers often perform activities such as writing software code, designing software interfaces and systems, acting as medical professionals, teachers, writers, scientists, and many other...Read More

Some forms of human endeavor are based on ideas and creativity where value comes from knowledge instead of manual labor. Peter Drucker coined the phrase “knowledge work” to describe less physical forms of work in the book The Landmarks of Tomorrow. In the book, Drucker predicted that the biggest benefits to society would come from...Read More

Some teams choose to have all their developers work on solving the same problem simultaneously. Mob programming, or “mobbing” for short, extends the notion of pair programming, often leveraging the driver/navigator pattern to guide the nature of the interaction. A significant difference is that in pair programming, there is one driver (at the keyboard), and...Read More

A hallmark of Agile software development teams is the notion that any developer can contribute to the code base. Collective code ownership is a practice that originated in eXtreme Programming (XP), and one of its many benefits is that no one person can become a bottleneck when it comes to making the code better. A...Read More