Experience based tips and tricks that can help your software development team become leaner

1. Lean Software Development Tips
and Tricks
Augusto “Gus” Evangelisti - PaddyPower PLC
E-mail: augeva@gmail.com
Twitter: @augeva

2. Lean principles
Eliminate Waste
Optimize The Whole
Focus On Customers
Energize Workers
Learn First
Deliver Fast
Build Quality In
Keep Getting Better
(Mary and Tom Poppendiek)

3. Tip #1: Easy
Identify waste

4. The Waste Snake

5. What you need
Whiteboard/A3 Sheet
Post-its
Curious team

6. Tip #2: easy
Ask “Why?”

7. Ask “Why?”
Software is a liability
Resolving problems with very little software is of
great value

8. Let me tell you a story
1965 - US Army: “We need a cost effective
fighter jet that can reach speed of mach3”
Many companies tried, one succeeded let me
tell you a story

9. Thunderchief Vs Eagle

10. That means
Refuse solutions to unknown problems
understand what the real problem is (asking
“why?”) and then resolve that (Gojko Adzic)

11. What you need
Courage
Trust
Empathy
Curious team

12. Tip #3: Medium
See the whole

13. Have you ever seen this?

14. What’s the solution?

15. That means
Focus on the full flow
Remove barriers, collaborate, be cross
functional, remove silo departments, whole
team responsibility and accountability, fight
suboptimization.

16. What you need
Curious team
Empathy
No barriers
No politics
One goal, one direction

17. Tip #4: Difficult
Have zero tolerance for
defects

18. Bugs are waste
The worst kind of waste!
Don’t write them in the first place!
Focus on prevention TDD/BDD
Implement fast feedback loops

19. If a bug slips through
Fix it immediately
We don’t need to log categorize, sort, triage,
asses, fight over BUGS
We need to fix them so that our customers are
happy
A bug management tool is another backlog,
ditch it, we’ve done it and we’re happy!

20. Collaborate and prevent

21. What you need
Curious team
Empathy
No barriers
No politics
Passion for our craft

22. Tip #X: Easy
Don’t ask for permission,
beg for forgiveness!

23. What do these things have in
common?

24. They were failures

25. What does this mean?
The wrong answer is the right answer to a
different question (Paul Sloane)
Experiment, try new things, things you’ve never
done before, accept failure and learn from it.
Only people that don’t innovate never fail.
You can only improve trying new things, you can
only innovate trying new things, don’t be
afraid of failure

26. So?
Fail often
Fail cheap
How can I fail cheap? Prototyping, spiking, getting
fast feedback, speaking to the customers, getting
out of my building and speaking about my idea.

27. What you need
Curious team
Courage
Desire to learn

28. Read More
These readings inspired me:
• Lean Software Development - An agile toolkit (Mary and Tom Poppendiek)
• Impact Mapping (Gojko Adzic)
• The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Mary and Tom Poppendiek)
• The Innovative Leader(Paul Sloane)
More to come on:
http://mysoftwarequality.wordpress.com/

29. Tip #6: Easy
Use communities of
practice to innovate

30. Tip #7: Difficult
Stop predicting, be
predictable
#NoEstimates

31. Questions?