I have been working as a software consultant for more than 11 years. Because of that I am an eager supporter of lean principles and agile methods.
I while ago Shmula blog invited readers to pose questions to Mary Poppendieck. Yesterday the interview was published.
Mary and Tom are by the way releasing a new book in early september:
“Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash“
, a sequel to their previous book.
Intra-project communication becomes more and more challenging with increasing team sizes. When team size increase so does the number of different communication channels. Every team member can communicate with every other team member. Mathematically it looks like this:
number of communication channels = n(n-1)/2, n=team size
In a team with two persons we get one communication channel and everything is fine. With too many communication channels synchronisation and distribution of information becomes increasingly difficult. I’m sure everyone has experienced that.
XP recommends maximum 10 and Scrum recommends 7 +/- 2. However Jeff Sutherland experienced that the hyper productive teams he encountered were never larger than 7 people. He advices us to split up any team larger than 7 people into multiple teams.
Amazon recommends 2PT – “Two Pizza Team”, which is a team size no larger than 2 pizzas can feed. You be the judge of how many that is…
I didn’t like the previous layout and I also got some complaints about it, so I just wasted some time updating the layout. I think it was worth it.
Updated
JAOO, october 1-6, Aarhus DK
Non-commercial and non-academic conference with lots of interesting tracks and speakers. Recommended!
Lund Software Days 2006, october 16-18, Lund
LUCAS is the Center for Applied Software Research at Lund University and they ususally have a conference once a year, lately together with Spin-Syd in the joint venture Lund Software Days.
SERPS 2006, october 18-19, Umeå
SERPS is an academic conference on software engineering research and practice.
Øredev 2006, november 15-16, Malmö
Øredev is a developer’s conference focused on java and .NET, and has also tracks for methods & tools, test, project management and embedded systems. Their main attraction is the key note by Martin Fowler.
I will hold a speech 15 September 08:00 in Malmö on the subject Lean Configuration Management.
Configuration Management is about handling change and agile methods are said to embrace change. How come those two concepts are seldom mentioned together? I will talk about how agile methods affect CM and how CM is applied in agile methods in a way that I call Lean CM.
You are welcome to register!
Links:
Frukostseminarium om Lean Configuration Management (in Swedish)
For a short period of time I was employed by Q-Labs, a company dedicated to process improvement within software development. However they seem to be stuck in a traditional thinking with a rigid requirements process and heavy project planning upfront, trying to be predictive instead of adaptive. And for some reason they keep promoting CMM/CMMI.
In their latest newsletter (in swedish) they describe how they made Intentia (now Lawson) become more efficient. The measures they suggested were clearly non-agile, focusing on prolonging the project planning period in the beginning of a project and making predictions about future plans. They also give them the advice to be less adaptive.
Being a company dedicated to software process improvement, I find it somewhat strange that they hardly even mention agile methods and processes on their web site. I bet that I can help Intentia become even more efficient using agile methods.
Links:
Q-Labs newsletter
