Inspection is not enough
Deming is world famous, especially in the Agile/Lean world. During his life Deming taught top management how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing and sales. His name is synonymous to quality improvement and his philosophies are still seen as visionary.
One of Deming’s principles is: “Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.” Sounds good, right? In stead of testing every last inch of your product, you increase it’s intrinsic quality which is more sustainable, has a direct benefit for the customer and eventually lowers cost.
Now how does that relate to software development? In software development we do quite a bit of inspection, not only by peer reviews but mostly by testing. We test documents, units of code, modules of code, systems, user interfaces, services etc. We test functionality, speed, error handling, ease of use, fit for purpose etc. etc. My interpretation of what Deming would say to us: focus less on creating more tests, focus more on product and process quality.
Continued…
Posted in Process.
Tagged with agile, deming, testing.
By Machiel Groeneveld
– 9 March, 2010
Isn’t Scrum a project management method?
No it’s not. It’s a product development method (or framework). The good thing is that projects always have a product development part, so Scrum can be embedded in your project. But beware of the ’Scrum organizational model’ which is geared mostly to product development companies. If your organization chooses to have projects for all new development, you’ll need to embed Scrum in a project management model.
Continued…
Posted in Process.
Tagged with agile, prince2, product development, scrum.
By Machiel Groeneveld
– 27 November, 2009
Uit meerdere nieuwsberichten blijkt dat de markt voor ICT detachering een neerwaartse beweging maakt. De politie wil na een periode van exhorbitante uitgaven aan inhuur de detachering beperken. Binnen de overheid wordt gewaarschuwd voor ongebreidelde inhuur van externen en men maant om beperking. Ook bij commerciële bedrijven wordt forst gesneden in externe krachten. Van de externen die wel worden ingehuurd wordt lager tarief gevraagd en dan gaat het niet altijd om een paar procent, maar soms om halvering of zelfs tot een nul tarief. Voor een senior ontwikkelaar worden regelmatig maximumtarieven gesteld van 40 of 50 euro per uur. Een jaar geleden was dat rond de 80 tot 90 euro.
Het indammen van inhuur en drastisch verlagen van tarieven heeft gevolgen. De markt zal zich aanpassen aan deze verandering in de vraag. Een kort overzicht van wat dit op korte termijn kan betekenen, ervan uitgaande dat er geen structurele verandering komt in de vraag:
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Posted in Process.
Tagged with ict, tarieven, trend.
By Machiel Groeneveld
– 15 November, 2009
Hippo is a Dutch Content Management System (CMS) company. Friday the 30th of October was the second Forge Friday in Hippo’s history and my first in depth encounter with this product. Hippo has gained popularity in Dutch government deals and Hippo powers some large governmental websites. This is a quite an achievement and although the product has great potential, from my perspective Hippo disappointed in both technical and customer perspective. I hope my gripes will be fixed in future releases so Hippo can continue its success.
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Posted in Software Development.
Tagged with cms, hippo, open source.
By Machiel Groeneveld
– 31 October, 2009
Much of my work consists of solving problems. Problems in areas such as the development process, cooperation between team members, software architecture etc. I’ve noticed there are roughly two ways to solve problems, using big solutions or using small solutions (for lack of a better term). A lot has been written about big redesigns etc. however, I want to understand where these big solutions come from. I think it’s our natural tendency to abstract situations which makes us favor big solutions, even though they’re not always the best option.
After explain the usual method I’ll give you some examples which you can probably identify with. The next post will discuss the small solutions and their gripes.
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Posted in Process.
Tagged with problems, solutions.
By Machiel Groeneveld
– 22 October, 2009
In the much praised book Flow about product development the management of queues and bottle necks are a central theme. The book states principles on how to best deal with them. Traffic lanes and cars are great for showing the (wrong) use of queuing because most people can relate to traffic jams and bottlenecks in a traffic situation.
One major topic of any process optimization is the management of bottlenecks. One intriguing statement is made, it urges to go beyond the popular idea that ‘the capacity of the bottleneck controls system flow’. It’s not only the bottleneck, it also very important to look at the flow through the bottleneck.
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Posted in Process.
Tagged with bottlenecks, flow, lean, queues.
By Machiel Groeneveld
– 10 October, 2009
The Chaos Reports are one the most citated reports used in Agile presentations and courses. The most famous piece of data is the chart that shows that, in the projects studied, very few features developed were actually used. Minimizing the amount of unused features is core to Agile projects. But there is something odd about the Chaos Reports. The data they contain might be valid (or not), but the targets that they measure have one serious flaw, they measure the wrong objectives. Even more troublesome is the fact that most customers I deal with measure the same objectives: conformance to budget and deadlines. I call for suppliers to urge their customers to start measuring up and collaborate on achieving what really matters to their customers.
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Posted in Process.
By Machiel Groeneveld
– 9 September, 2009
The pre-project phase is a hot topic that I’ve blogged about before under the header ‘Iteration -1″.
This post is on the ‘pre-iteration-1′ phase, before the project has even started. I’ll explain the contradiction that I’ve found in my experience with starting Agile projects. Preparing a project is not the same as executing a project and therefore the Agile principles don’t apply cleanly to the pre-project phase (oh, dear).
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Posted in Process.
Tagged with agile, business case.
By Machiel Groeneveld
– 27 August, 2009
There are quite a few myths about the profession of software developer. Most people find the profession hard to describe. So what is the ‘essence of software development’? For me it’s a mix of creativity, struggle and craftsmanship and love of technology. Striving for the perfect solution in an imperfect environment.
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Posted in Software Development.
Tagged with crafstmanship, creativity.
By Machiel Groeneveld
– 12 July, 2009
