launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/11/23 Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> We do. LEAN rocks. Has anyone read Mary & Tom's latest book[1]? I
> ordered a copy last week but it will be a few weeks before it arrives in
> this distant land. :-(

I haven't, but I'd like to.  As it happens I was just re-reading Lean
Software Development the other day and thinking about a few things as
they relate to Canonical:

Iterations: what are they good for?  Doing regular time-based releases
seems very good: you have to release, and doing it metronomically
makes sure it gets done.  But why would you actually fill an immediate
work queue per iteration, rather than continuously?  The reason seems
to be that you need to explicitly get input from customer
representatives, and you can't do that continuously.

But for an open source project and a web service that doesn't seem
true.  Our users give feedback continuously; inserting batching seems
unnecessary.

And this leads into kanban and pull scheduling: the closest match to
that seems to be that developers should pick tasks not from a list
scheduled to a milestone, but from a single overall queue.

This is where we ended up in Bazaar, and it seems better than having
an intermediate queue of 'things to do soon'.

Also, they talk about the harmfulness of treating process definition
as a separate activity, and I was thinking about the Canonical CoPs-
probably well intentioned, but perhaps better to talk about this on a
general canonical-tech list, not restricted to people interested in
process?

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>