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

Attribute 'for' of label component with id xxxx is not defined

I got the warning in the log file when I have used the tag <h:outputLabel> without attribute " for " in xhtml file. It was really polluting my server log files. The logged information actually makes sense anyway! We could find an answer as the following: "Having h:outputLabel without a "for" attribute is meaningless. If you are not attaching the label, you should be using h:outputText instead of h:outputLabel." However, these solutions are not possible just for my situation. Instead of using h:outputText for only displaying text, my team has used h:outputLabel too many places. We were nearly in our release time (next day) so it is quite risky and takes much efforts if we try to correct it. Because the style (with CSS) is already done with h:ouputLabel . The alternative by adding attribute " for " the existing h:outputLabel is not reasonable either. I really need to find another solution. Fortunately, I came across a way if I cha...

Resolution for 2016

HCM full stack developer Meetup This is the topic of HMC full stack developers' meetup this time. We have shared our ideas and discussed about them. Most of discussions is focused on career path for developers in Vietnam and what next we will do in 2016. I have a problem with my career path in Vietnam. I seem to get lost my motivation because I don't like to become either a manager or a TA (such as Technical Assistant, Technical Analysis, Technical Architect). But, why only are there either manager or TA in Vietnam? How about a 60-years experiences developer? Salary is actually an issue. I admire several great developers in the world such as Jeff Atwood ( stackoverflow.com founder), John Sonmez ( simpleprogrammer.com fouder). They created very great and valuable stuffs for the community and they are free of finance - of course, I think. Why can't I follow that way? I would like to not only create cool stuffs but also get high salary. I love to becom...

Separate Constructing a System from Using It

I n the real world, in order to use a building (hotel, supermarket, etc) we need to construct it first. This concern should be applied for software development as well. Step by step, I would like to show you the issue about no separation of constructing and using it and then I'll give you some approaches to overcome this issue. | Note : you can find the  below  demonstrated code here    Take a Look the Following Simple Application Used tools and technologies: Eclipse (Mars), JDK 1.8 I had an App which uses Controller . Controller uses Service (an interface). Finally, Service has one concrete class is DefaultService . //package vn.nvanhuong.system.separationconstructing; public class App { public static void main(String[] args) { Controller controller = new Controller(); controller.doAction(); } } public class Controller { private Service service; public void doAction(){ System.out.println("doAction in Controller"); getService().execut...

Safari (older than 14.1.1) rejects TLS connections of TURN with Let's Encrypt certificates

Summary We could not make a video call successfully on Safari older than 14.1.1. The call kept disconnecting for some seconds. We got the following error in Nginx’s log SSL: error:14094418:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 alert unknown ca:SSL alert number 48   Root cause The Safari didn’t trust our TLS certificates (certified by Let’s Encrypt) when establishing a TLS connection into our TURN server. It is a known issue that could be found at Bug 219274 - ICE does not resolve for `turns` relay candidates rooted in LetsEncrypt CA . The issue was just recently fixed (end of 2020), therefore old versions of Safari still meet the issues.   Solution In our development environment, we replaced the untrusted certificate with a trusted one. We will warn our customers about this issue in our installation guide. Technical explained WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as all iOS web browsers. The WebRTC of WebKit relied on ...

BIRT - Fix the size of an image

I use a dynamic image as a logo my report in pdf. At the beginning, I use table to align the logo in left or right. I meet a problem with some images with a large width or height. My customer requires that the logo should be displayed in original size. These following steps solves my problem: 1. Use Grid instead of Table 2. Set Grid "Height" is 100%  and "Width" is blank 3. Set "Fit to container" for images are "true". Download the the template here .