Skip to main content

How to apply Lean - Kanban for your business

This is the topic of Scrum Breakfast meetup this time, speaker: Ms. Phuong Bui - Technical Project Manager of YOOSE Pte. Ltd.


Lean comes from Lean manufacturing is a method that focuses on elimination of wastes. In other words, this is a set of principles for archiving the quality, speed and customer alignment. The first time I knew about the term "Lean" is  from the book Software Craftsmanship. Sandro recommends if we want to transform our pet projects into a real business, we should get familiar with Lean Startup concepts.

In this talk, Ms. Phuong pointed out some major wastes includes information (ex: unclear requirements), processes (ex: waiting), physical environment and people. Knowing what the problems should be the best way to eliminate them.

The difference between Single item flow and Batch processing is the second main point; and it is the Lean's idea. Batch processing performs many working items in each steps, so that it is easy to get stuck on a step and block the whole process. Single item flow, on the other hand, approaches getting done of the limit working items (small number normally) and no waiting in each steps; so that it is easy to find and remove the "bottleneck" as early as possible.


We can imagine that Batch processing uses the way "push" and Single item flow uses "pull" in conversely.

Lean can be implemented by Kanban, that is somehow similar to the case Scrum implements Agile. In my point of view, there is nothing wrong when saying Lean is like a specification and Kanban is like a Lean's concrete implementation. :)

Kanban board


The following is what Kanban can do:
  • Visualize our workflow: keeping track our work easily
  • Limit work in-process: providing fast feedback to know where bottleneck is and eliminate it by arranging resources reasonably.
  • Make process policies explicit: defining what is DOD (definition of done) in each Kanban columns in order to know how to decide "pull" the items or not.
  • Manage and improve flow.
  • Continuous improvement

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

[Snippet] CSS - Child element overlap parent

I searched from somewhere and found that a lot of people says a basic concept for implementing this feature looks like below: HTML code: <div id="parent">  <div id="child">  </div> </div> And, CSS: #parent{   position: relative;   overflow:hidden; } #child{   position: absolute;   top: -1;   right: -1px; } However, I had a lot of grand-parents in my case and the above code didn't work. Therefore, I needed an alternative. I presumed that my app uses Boostrap and AngularJs, maybe some CSS from them affects mine. I didn't know exactly the problem, but I believed when all CSS is loaded into my browser, I could completely handle it. www.tom-collinson.com I tried to create an example to investigated this problem by Fiddle . Accidentally, I just changed: position: parent; to position: static; for one of parents -> the problem is solved. Look at my code: <div class="modal-body dn-placeholder-parent-positi...

How I did customize "rasa-nlu-trainer" as my own tool

Check out my implementation here Background I wanted to have a tool for human beings to classify intents and extract entities of texts which were obtained from a raw dataset such as Rocket.chat's conversation, Maluuba Frames or  here . Then, the output (labeled texts) could be consumed by an NLU tool such as Rasa NLU. rasa-nlu-trainer was a potential one which I didn't need to build an app from scratch. However, I needed to add more of my own features to fulfill my needs. They were: 1. Loading/displaying raw texts stored by a database such as MongoDB 2. Manually labeling intents and entities for the loaded texts 3. Persisting labeled texts into the database I firstly did look up what rasa-nlu-trainer 's technologies were used in order to see how to implement my mentioned features. At first glance rasa-nlu-trainer was bootstrapped with Create React App. Create React App is a tool to create a React app with no build configuration, as it said. This too...

Strategy Design Pattern

For example, I have a program with an Animal abstract class and two sub-classes Dog and Bird. I want to add new behavior for the class Animal, this is "fly".  Now, I face two approaches to solve this issue: 1. Adding an abstract method "fly" into the class Animal. Then, I force the sub-classes should be implemented this method, something like: public abstract class Animal{ //bla bla public abstract void fly(); } public class Bird extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Fly high"); } } public class Dog extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Cant fly"); } } 2. Creating an interface with method "fly" inside. The same issue to an abstract class, I force the classes these implement this interface should have a method "fly" inside: public interface Flyable{ public void fly(); } public class Bird implements Flyable{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.pr...

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...