Geek Philosophy

Yesterday I was able to attend a mini-conference entitled “Lean Development for Lean Times”, put on by Agile Vancouver. The conference consisted of 3 speakers in two rooms, each speaking twice over the course of three time slots, allowing everyone to see every speaker (or one speaker twice, if they so desired). As you know, my company has been investigating lean development practices, and my manager was one of the conference organizers, so there ended up being about 10 people from Sophos there. Thankfully, there was a mix of software developers, managers, product management, and even the VP of development, which I believe increases our chances of adopting lean.

The first speaker I took in was Silicon Valley veteran Eric Ries, who gave a rapid-fire talk on the Lean Startup. The talk was quite informative, my favourite of the three, even though I have no desire to start or join a startup – the ideas and methods he gave are applicable to startup-like teams within large organizations as well. I took extensive notes, and I’ll likely end up doing a separate post just on this talk (unless my writing duplicates Eric’s website, which I have yet to read in-depth).

The second talk was given by Corey Ladas entitled “Scrumban: Lean Thinking for Agile Process Evolution”. Scrumban is a portmanteau of Scrum, an implementation of the agile software methodology, and kanban, a japanese word translated roughly as “sign board”. Scrumban is the idea of taking kanban cards, an idea borrowed directly from lean manufacturing, and integrating them into the standard agile task board as a way of implementing pull scheduling. This is an idea that I’m likely going to try out with my team, so I’ll talk more about the concept once I’ve had a bit of experience with it.

The last talk of the day was “An Introduction to Lean Product Development” by Katherine Radeka. True to its name, it was an introductory talk on lean development principles, how lean development differs from lean manufacturing, and the nature of waste. Having read a few books on lean recently, there was nothing too groundbreaking here for me, although I did enjoy the Q&A and participatory aspects of the talk.

I quite enjoyed the conference, and it was interesting to see the reactions of people to some of the claims being put forth by the presenters (as well as from others in the audience). Hopefully I’ll get to try out some of these techniques at work, and I’ll definitely post about any successes or failures that result.