Home > Work > Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit
1 " Suppose a developer has a conversation with a customer about details of a feature. The conversation should not be considered complete until it is expressed as a customer test. "
― Mary Poppendieck , Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit
2 " It may seem like writing tests slows down development; in fact, testing does not cost, it pays, both during development and over the system’s lifecycle. "
3 " The simple mathematical fact working here is that variation is always amplified as it moves down a chain of connected events. A little variation in step one introduces a huge variation five steps later. "
4 " He notes that the policies established to solve a problem will often exacerbate the problem, creating a downward spiral: As a problem gets worse, managers apply even more aggressively the very policies that are causing the problem. "
5 " Frameworks should be extracted from a collection of successful implementations, not built on speculation. "
6 " However, if damaging behavior can be limited through the relationship rather than the contract, all manner of benefits in terms of speed, flexibility, cost, and information exchange can result. Unfortunately, these benefits are counterintuitive "
7 " In a three-year period, we had 78 projects, and 77 of them were delivered on time, on budget, and in scope. Then I surveyed the customers and found out that none of them was happy! "
8 " Thus, fixed-price contracts tend to select the vendor most likely to get in trouble. "
9 " There are few endeavors in which it is more important to keep options open than in software development. In Chapter 3, “Decide as Late as Possible "
10 " A Standish Group study found that 45 percent of features in a typical system are never used and 19 percent are rarely used. "
11 " Set-based development means that you communicate constraints, not solutions. "
12 " resist the temptation to jump to a solution; "
13 " keep the constraints of the problem visible "
14 " No one has yet figured out how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led,” wrote John Kotter "
15 " It is much more important to develop people with the expertise to make wise decisions than it is to develop decision-making processes that purportedly think for people. We are also convinced that it is quite possible to develop many people who are able to make wise intuitive decisions. "
16 " the critical factor in motivation is not measurement,8 but empowerment: moving decisions to the lowest possible level in an organization while developing the capacity of those people to make decisions wisely. "
17 " Resistance indicates a perceived threat to a largely unconscious belief system, one that has no doubt successfully guided the organization in the past. "
18 " because the belief system has no doubt led to success in the past, so it will fight back with many varieties of self-fulfilling prophecies. "
19 " If the vision of perceived integrity isn’t refreshed regularly, the engineers have a tendency to get lost in the technical details and forget the customer values. "
20 " Focusing exclusively on local measurements has a tendency to inhibit collaboration beyond the area being measured, because there is no reward for it. "