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.

http://www.meetup.com/Scrum-Breakfast-Vietnam-Agile-and-Scrum-Meetup/events/230313727/

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

http://leankit.com/learn/kanban/what-is-kanban/

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

What the heck is Meteor DDP?

I was using Meteor for my messenger project. I was so curious about the real time connection. I wanted to know how exactly this mechanism works. In this post, I will go through the DDP Specification, an overview of WebSocket, and a simple demo about how to subscribe a publication of Rocket.Chat (containing a DDP server) from an external webpage. At a glance, I knew that Meteor invented a protocol called DDP which uses for handling real time connection. So then, what is DDP? "DDP (Distributed Data Protocol) is the stateful WebSocket protocol that Meteor uses to communicate between the client and the server." [1] All right! Why does DDP matter? "DDP is a standard way to solve the biggest problem facing client-side JavaScript developers: querying a server-side database, sending the results down to the client, and then pushing changes to the client whenever anything changes in the database" . [2] In order to understand deeply the protocol, I decided ...

Validate date with Datejs

Datejs is an open source JavaScript Date library for parsing, formatting and processing. Website: http://www.datejs.com function isValid(date, pattern){ if(pattern == null){ return false; } var parseExact = Date.pareExact(date, pattern); if(parseExact !== null){ return true; } return false; } Another popular date library is Moment.js

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...

Merging source in SVN

My team has used Primefaces for our projects. We sometimes have several branches of the projects with a new Primefaces's release. For example, we currently have a project with two branches, a branch for using Primeface 4.0, a trunk for using Primeface 5.0, and we are working these parallel branches. Our project looks like the following: - myProject - branches + primefaces4 + tag + trunk (primefaces5) My problem is how to copy the same source from the trunk to the branch "primefaces4". That is where SVN Merging can help! Here is the steps those I have conducted in my project. Step 1 : open the project with the branch "primefaces4" Step 2 : Team > Merge... Chose the trunk's URL. For example: http://192.168.9.10/svn/myProject/trunk Step 3 : Select the revision from "trunk" to merge. For example: +--revision--+--date--------+--author----+--comment---+ + 10 + 03.10.2014 + vanhuong + f1: part 3 + + 9 ...

Only allow input number value with autoNumeric.js

autoNumeric is a jQuery plugin that automatically formats currency and numbers as you type on form inputs. I used autoNumeric 1.9.21 for demo code. 1. Dowload autoNumeric.js file from https://github.com/BobKnothe/autoNumeric 2. Import to project <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/autoNumeric.js"></script> 3. Define a function to use it <script type="text/javascript"> /* only number is accepted */ function txtNumberOnly_Mask() { var inputOrgNumber = $("#numberTxt"); inputOrgNumber.each(function() { $(this).autoNumeric({ aSep : '', aDec: '.', vMin : '0.00' }); }); } </script> 4. Call the function by event <form> <input type="text" value="" id="numberTxt"/>(only number) </form> <script ty...

vhandit

Search This Blog