A few years after eBay acquired Paypal, people at Paypal found themselves constrained by long planning cycles, big upfront analysis, domain bottlenecks and long integration test cycles. Yikes! How did Paypal transform into a organisation delivering customer focussed solutions (not projects) in an Agile way, and aligned teams to Products instead of projects? Here’s the case study (PDF).
Taiichi Ohno is considered father of the Toyota Production System. He pioneered Lean management practices that form the heart of Toyota Product System. Here’s a short summary of a book that focusses on his work. It highlights 15 key lessons learned while practicing Lean across 4 decades.
Agile is a good fit in product development and innovation scenarios. But can you build a hardware product using Agile in just one day? This is definitely pushing the limits. Here’s an experiment that aimed to achieve exactly this.
Top leaders in an organisation have a huge influence on the culture of the organisation in two ways. They decide what to reward and punish by way of financial incentives, promotions, hiring, and firing. Second, they model the behavior that others follow. Scrum is based on a cultural mindset that is often rather different from the existing cultures. How does it affect prevailing culture over a period of time? Have a look.
Is the Scrum Master always an appropriate mentor for every team member? Probably not. Well, to start with, what do we mean by mentoring? Is there any difference between coaching, teaching and mentoring? Here’s a good primer.
Ever heard anyone say, “Oh, I know the issue. I did that and it went away”, or “I saw it work that way”. And the advice that follows is that if you do things like that, it’ll work for you also. This is a simplistic assumption. And a dangerous one as well. Here’s why.
Estimation is tough. How do you estimate when you are still in the process of forming a team? Or you may have an established team, but the product you are going to build is very complex and your team members haven’t done such work before – at all. It’s really really tough to estimate in these situations. So what can you do? It may be easier than you think.
Compared to integration and system tests, unit tests are small and atomic, and run fast. But how do you write unit tests when an object under test might have dependencies on other objects? Which happens more than we’d like. What if you need to interact with a database, communicate with a web service or a message queue? Well, you can use mock objects. Here’s how.
AGILE
How Agile Transformation Worked at Paypal?
A few years after eBay acquired Paypal, people at Paypal found themselves constrained by long planning cycles, big upfront analysis, domain bottlenecks and long integration test cycles. Yikes! How did Paypal transform into a organisation delivering customer focussed solutions (not projects) in an Agile way, and aligned teams to Products instead of projects? Here’s the case study (PDF).
stories.paypal-corp.com
LEAN
15 Management Lessons From Taiichi Ohno
Taiichi Ohno is considered father of the Toyota Production System. He pioneered Lean management practices that form the heart of Toyota Product System. Here’s a short summary of a book that focusses on his work. It highlights 15 key lessons learned while practicing Lean across 4 decades.
aleanjourney.com
AGILE
How to Build a Hardware Product Using Agile In a Day?
Agile is a good fit in product development and innovation scenarios. But can you build a hardware product using Agile in just one day? This is definitely pushing the limits. Here’s an experiment that aimed to achieve exactly this.
blog.crisp.se
How does Scrum Transform Culture?
Top leaders in an organisation have a huge influence on the culture of the organisation in two ways. They decide what to reward and punish by way of financial incentives, promotions, hiring, and firing. Second, they model the behavior that others follow. Scrum is based on a cultural mindset that is often rather different from the existing cultures. How does it affect prevailing culture over a period of time? Have a look.
www.agileforall.com
Is Scrum Master a Mentor?
Is the Scrum Master always an appropriate mentor for every team member? Probably not. Well, to start with, what do we mean by mentoring? Is there any difference between coaching, teaching and mentoring? Here’s a good primer.
blog.scrum.org
COACHING
I’ve Done It Before. It Must Work
Ever heard anyone say, “Oh, I know the issue. I did that and it went away”, or “I saw it work that way”. And the advice that follows is that if you do things like that, it’ll work for you also. This is a simplistic assumption. And a dangerous one as well. Here’s why.
flowchainsensei.wordpress.com
TEAMS
What to Do When You Can’t Estimate?
Estimation is tough. How do you estimate when you are still in the process of forming a team? Or you may have an established team, but the product you are going to build is very complex and your team members haven’t done such work before – at all. It’s really really tough to estimate in these situations. So what can you do? It may be easier than you think.
mountaingoatsoftware.com
DEVELOPER
Basics of Mocking in Unit Testing
Compared to integration and system tests, unit tests are small and atomic, and run fast. But how do you write unit tests when an object under test might have dependencies on other objects? Which happens more than we’d like. What if you need to interact with a database, communicate with a web service or a message queue? Well, you can use mock objects. Here’s how.
dzone.com
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