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Small Controlled Experiments

Small Controlled Experiments

http://verraes.net

The project was of to a bad start: an inherited legacy codebase, a waterfall contract, and a projected loss. The promise of Kaizen or Continuous Improvement seemed very appealing. But when we tried to incorporate this into our process, it didn’t catch on. Biweekly retrospectives didn’t seem to expose any problems we could improve upon. The ceremonies we tried, like Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles, added too much overhead. We were doing something wrong.

Continuous Improvement implies that you know exactly where to focus your efforts. Like scientists, we started to experiment, without deciding upfront what we expected the outcome to be. The rules? Make every experiment as small as possible. No meetings, no consensus, no cumbersome evaluation process. We let the results speak for themselves. This talk explores the successes and failures of a team that went from survival mode to learning mode over the course of a year.

Mathias Verraes

October 03, 2014
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  1. "When changing teams or organizations, the trick is not to

    try and push them out of their current behavior. (...) A better idea is to change parameters in the environment so that their current situation becomes unstable and disappears all by itself." 4 Jurgen Appelo6 6 Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders
  2. "If we have data, let's look at data. If all

    we have are opinions, let's go with mine." 4 Jim Barksdale
  3. "If an idea is obviously bad, find a quick way

    to test it, because if it's not bad, then it's really interesting." 4 Kent Beck