Our New Development Process
In Agile Development for Tiny Teams, I presented an overview of our original development and project management process. I highlighted a number of challenges we encountered by using it. Thanks to Jon Stahl, Josh and I were exposed to the application of Kanban to the software development process. I was convinced that Kanban was the right tool for us. However, the question of exactly how to implement it as part of a new overall development process remained.
We determined that our new process needed to be:
- Simple – Being a tiny team, the impact of time used managing the process rather than used generating billable work product is magnified.
- Able to handle concurrent projects – We needed to be able to support ongoing development needs of current clients while continuing to develop new clients and projects.
- Scalable – We will add subcontractors to our team as needs arise. Our new process must work regardless of the team size. It also needed to be easy to teach to new team members.
- Flexible – In addition to client work, Josh and I are partners in Prfessor.com which includes a significant amount of development efforts. The process needed to be flexible enough to manage these obligations too.
- Waste Reducing – We needed to address the four top areas of waste that I identified in our original process (see Eliminating Waste from Your Agile Process)
- Work In Process (more than the bare minimum necessary)
- Rework
- Over-engineering the code
- Repetitive tasks
From Jon’s presentation I realized that we really had two separate workflows, one nested inside the other. We never formalized that distinction, but when we began to view things in terms of MMFs (Minimally Marketable Features) the nested process jumped right out. Understanding this nesting was critical to the success of our new process.
Codemash Presentations That You Won’t Want To Miss
The Codemash Conference is coming up again this year in just a few weeks. It is always my favorite conference of the year, bringing together a diverse crowd of developers to learn practices from each others industries.
I have compiled a list of talks that I know you’ll enjoy. Some of these I’ve heard previously, and others are presented by people that are always interesting/entertaining.
Can I make a living as an Entrepreneur?
I have a difficult time explaining what I do to my grandfather. He bears his skeptical face when I tell him that I’m an entrepreneur on the internet.
“Trying to strike it rich, eh?”
Truthfully, I don’t think he understands how I feed my family, but that’s ok. But, this story does bring up a question that’s raised all the time among prospective entrepreneurs.
Can I strike it rich if I go on my own?
My response is always “yes and no.” Chad Moutray, the Chief Economist of the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration, published some of his research on the income likelihood of entrepreneurs. His research backs up my response nicely.
Eliminating Waste from your Agile Process
A central pillar of a lean software development process is elimination of waste. So what is “waste” in a software development process? In a manufacturing process, any amount of work in process above the bare minimum to meet production levels is waste. Keith Swenson recently wrote an an excellent article “Taiichi Ohno Reinterpreted” where he observed:
Agile Development for Tiny Teams
D-I is proud to be a tiny firm. We have always been a tiny firm, but we haven’t always been able to get big projects accomplished. While we do use subcontractors quite often, the firm is still just Josh and myself.
We believe that software should be high quality. It should be efficient, tested and intuitively designed. When it comes to features, enough is enough. We believe you should build what you need, and nothing else. We also believe that the process of developing the product is as important as the product itself.
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