Monday, March 20, 2006

Better Printer Software

HP gets 3.4x productivity gain from Agile Management techniques "These guys are awesome - Bret Dodd and Sterling Mortensen. Last year they attended Lean Design and Development and watched my presentation. They were so impressed and felt it was such a good fit for their process for development of printer firmware that they went back to HP and plotted the historical cumulative flow diagram."

"A 10x reduction in inventory in the system. A 5x reduction in WIP. A 3.4x increase in productivity with no new money, resources, people or any change in the way software engineering (development and test) were conducted. These figures are even better than my Microsoft XIT Sustained Engineering project results. Now here is the real kicker - a reduction in lead (cycle) time from 9 months to only 2 months. Printer firmware development at HP was never this good. Imagine what this means for the people. They now go home early on Friday afternoons, they don't work overtime, they have rediscovered their social lives, their families and their passions."

WIP = work in progress.

Also, Agile Practices that Scale links to "Seven Agile Team Practices That Scale (Part I of II )". Includes: Iteration foundation (time boxed working code), The definebuildtest component team, Smaller and more frequent releases, Two-level planning (small and large), Concurrent testing (all code is tested code), Continuous integration and Regular reflection and adaptation.

Agile Journal looks interesting including "Agile Processes: Making Metrics Simple". This hits several nails on the head with definitions of code toxicity (like code duplication), hygienity (OO), and quality (bugs released).

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