Software engineering has undergone dramatic changes in the past two decades - moving from rigid waterfall processes with massive documentation written by people that don’t understand how to make quality software, death marches, and disengaged teams, to agile development to more recent things like DevOps and continuous delivery. Throughout this transition, Lean Thinking has provided consistent principles for making decisions about how to build quality software-based solutions collaboratively, rapidly, and reliably and aligned to the needs of the customer and the purpose of the organization.

Lean thinking starts with customers, looks at how many organization delivers value to those customers, and visualizes that value stream to identify wasteful practices and handoffs and continuously inspect, improve, and adapt. This energetic, fast-paced workshop does exactly that - we look at the real value streams of people attending the workshop. We question whether the workflow is set up to build the right thing, build the thing right, and deliver value to customers as rapidly as possible.

We’ll introduce Kanban as a tool for managing the flow of work like user stories and features in a process which is being adopted by many Agile and Lean teams (and many other people responsible for creating value). Participants in the workshop will learn to map their current work using Kanban, how to use the policies like limiting work-in-progress to achieve different kinds of outcomes, as well as how to define the policies that constrain the collaborative process of software development. You’ll learn how to use those policies to manage risk and to reset negotiations around prioritization and recast them as collaborative problem solving.

Learning Objectives:

• An introduction to Lean Thinking for Software Teams
• Aligning Lean Principles to Agile Principles
• Understanding Value and the customer
• Value Stream Mapping
• How to assess your value stream for inefficiencies
• Defining releases, planning work, and measuring throughput
• Why Continuous Delivery is essential and how to get there
• Using Metrics for Continuous Improvement
• Practices and metrics for focusing cross-functional teams on creating value
• Managing priorities and dependencies across multiple teams