Thursday, September 07, 2006

Becoming Lean - Mary Poppendieck's talk

I have just attended a local Agile users group's meeting. Today, Mary Poppendieck made a presentation about Lean Software Development.

I still need a time to organize my thought. But I am very excited and I just wanted to write this blog soon.

It was excellent. Every point she made totally made sense.

One thing she mentioned about Scrum was interesting, answering a question from an audience. It was about limiting the task to the capacity. I wondered about Project Backlog in Scrum myself. She answered that we shouldn't keep tasks in the backlog and ignore them. An interesting thing she mentioned was that Ken said that Scrum is for disfunctioning team. For properly functioning team, you don't need a backlog, she said.

And most memorable thing she mentioned today was Project vs Product. We should consider software development in the sense of Product. If it's Project, then fixed scope with up-front estimation is norm. But if it's Product, it usually works incrementally. It is a wonderful concept.

Can't wait to read her new book. When I went to Amazon website, the time to deliver was more than a month. So I think I will get one at OOPSLA. It's usually discounted and I can get author's autograph at the signing session.

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