Agile….at Starbucks?
I’m sitting here at Starbucks waiting for the garage across the parking lot to finish off some maintenance on my car. There’s a large queue forming at the counter, clearly the bottleneck is the ordering system.
So how does this Starbucks handle it? The person who prepares the coffee takes and starts the order and for the second person in line to increase throughput. By the time that person pays the cashier, their order is ready and out they go. Quick and efficient.
Seems like common sense doesn’t it? I wonder if the manager gets upset that they are breaking process?
On the flip side, when I go to Tim Hortons, it’s usually the cashier that takes the order and fills it so the next customer has to wait until the order is done. Sounds like single-piece flow to me. Makes sense for limiting WIP, might not be the right balance for getting customers through faster.
Of course it could just be my heightened senses as a result of the double Grande Americano I just chugged.
Your ‘Done’ Isn’t My ‘Done’
Last night I finished my taxes. I tweeted I was done. Not developer done, but done done. Lynn McKee pointed out that even my impression of ‘done’ was open to interpretation. Does ‘done’ mean finished with the calculations? Filed? Received refund? Being audited? Filed mine and my wifes?
That reminded me of a recent sprint planning session our team had. Our product owner considered customer value and done as being able to clearly show separation of presentation and data layers in a new service we’re developing. I considered customer value being showing the user of the new service a simple interpretation of the data being shown through the service. Very different perspectives. Read more
How to Pay Down Your Technical Debt
There is a sea of information about what technical debt is so I won’t elaborate on what it is and how to measure it. What I will elaborate on is how to pay down your technical debt in context of your business priorities.
Keeping in mind that the average business person doesn’t really understand or necessarily care about technical debt, all they really wonder is why it takes so long to get stuff done. Take, for example, the Rally story from Implementing Lean Software Development. Rally started building their agile project management software and after the first year they accumulated ‘technical debt’. Long story short, it took 14 months to get rid of it. Read the book for the details. Actually, read the book anyway, it’ll change your life. So what can you do? Read on… Read more
