Submitted Conference Content

Full name	Mathias Verraes
Job	Independent Software Consultant
email	mathias [at] verraes [dot] net
Skypeid	mathias.verraes
Phone number	32486316080
Company	Value Object Comm.V
City (Country)	Kortrijk
Time	45'
Type of Conference	Conference > 100 attendees
Level	Everybody

Small Controlled Experiments

Biography

Mathias Verraes is a recovering music composer turned programmer, consultant, blogger, and speaker. He advises companies on how to build enterprise web applications for complex business domains . For some weird reason, he enjoys working on large legacy projects: the kind where there’s half a million lines of spaghetti code, and nobody knows how to get the codebase under control. He’s the founder of the Domain-Driven Design Belgium community. When he’s not working, he’s at home in Kortrijk, Belgium, helping his two sons build crazy Lego train tracks.

Description

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.

Prerequisites

none

Benefits for the attendees

Learn how to improve faster, with less ceremony, and unexpected results.

Go to the submission page!

Submitted by ppetit on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 02:02

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