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

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 ...

JSF 2 - Dynamically manipulating the component tree with system events

Let's suppose we want to modify the metadata (attributes)  of elements such as render , requried , maxlength but we do not define in JSF tags. The manipulating components can be conducted in Drools  files, for example. How could we do? I think that is what we need to change something of component tree during JSF life-cycle. JSF supports event handling throughout the JSF life-cycle. In this post, I use two events: postAddToView for scanning components tree and preRenderView for manipulating the meta of components before rendering to GUI. I modified my own project from previous post for this example. This is my first further JSF trying out with the project as I said before. :) We define the tags f:event below the form - a container component of the components which we want to work on. The valid values for the attribute type for f:event can be found from tag library document  of JSF 2. <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" x...

Building a Wizard with Chain of Responsibility Pattern

What is the Idea? We want to create a page that there are some steps and each step has its own business. Users are able to click on a step and its status could be changed. Primefaces owns a component " Wizard " but it it quite hard for us in order to apply our very specific and complicated business domain logic on each step; even we cannot click on a step of this component. We somehow are able to use the component " TabView " works with a strong back-end mechanism. A backend mechanism! what do I mean? Yes, we need it because we want to abstract the behaviors of each step otherwise we will get trouble with many events handling. Obviously, each step has some behaviors  such as "next", "back" and "switch' are the same and they are related to each other; but the business of these behaviors can be different totally. That is where the pattern "Chain of Responsibility" can be applied. Step by Step Building It! In this simple pr...

Coding Exercise, Episode 1

I have received the following exercise from an interviewer, he didn't give the name of the problem. Honestly, I have no idea how to solve this problem even I have tried to read it three times before. Since I used to be a person who always tells myself "I am not the one good at algorithms", but giving up something too soon which I feel that I didn't spend enough effort to overcome is not my way. Then, I have sticked on it for 24 hours. According to the given image on the problem, I tried to get more clues by searching. Thanks to Google, I found a similar problem on Hackerrank (attached link below). My target here was trying my best to just understand the problem and was trying to solve it accordingly by the Editorial on Hackerrank. Due to this circumstance, it turns me to love solving algorithms from now on (laugh). Check it out! Problem You are given a very organized square of size N (1-based index) and a list of S commands The i th command will follow t...

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...