LeanDog

Leading Lean Software Development

Instructed by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
www.poppendieck.com

What Does This Course Cover?

Software is the heart and soul of a vast number of products and business processes; every year the ability to develop robust software systems quickly and reliably becomes more critical to the world economy. And yet, most companies use software development processes that were born when systems were coded in assembly language and computer hardware was more expensive than programmers' salaries.

Today we have pervasive internet, omnipresent social media, big data, and massively scalable hardware. These advances have flourished largely outside the realm of traditional software development practices, and they call into question the conventional wisdom of what it means to develop, scale, and maintain excellent software-intensive systems.

It's time to re-think our approach to software development processes, our perception of the people who create software, and our governance systems. This workshop presents an alternate framework for thinking about developing software-intensive systems - one based on Lean principles and the thinking of W. Edwards Deming.

What Will You Get From This Course?

• How to discover what customers really want.
• How to look at your process from a customer's point of view and identify waste.
• What's wrong with software testing and what you have to do to fix it.
• How to engage people and stimulate focused innovation.
• Scaling patterns that have proven successful - and their context.
• How to frame risk and rethink scheduling to permit confident promise-dating and reliable delivery.
• Tools for solving problems that everyone in the organization can use.
• Leadership roles that work - from the perspective of followers.
• How traditional governance systems can lead to sub-optimization and what to do about it

Learn first-hand from thought-leaders Mary and Tom Poppendieck how to reframe your software development process from the perspective of lean principles. Mary and Tom have pioneered the application of Lean Thinking to software development and documented their principles in three books, Leading Lean Software Development: Results are not the Point, Implementing Lean Software Development:From Concept to Cash, and Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit.

Instructor

Mary Poppendieck

Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both a product champion and department manager.

Mary considered retirement in 1998, but instead found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word “waterfall.” When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit in 2003 to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development.

Over the past six years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote a second book, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash in 2006. A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.

Tom Poppendieck

Tom Poppendieck has 25 years of experience in computing including eight years of work with object technology. His modeling and mentoring skills are rooted in his experience as a physics professor. His early work was in IT infrastructure, product development, and manufacturing support, and evolved to consulting project assignments in healthcare, logistics, mortgage banking, and travel services.

Tom led the development of a world-class product data management practice for a major commercial avionics manufacturer that reduced design to production transition efforts from 6 months to 6 weeks. He also led the technical architecture team for very large national and international Baan and SAP implementations.

Tom Poppendieck is an enterprise analyst and architect, and an agile process mentor. He focuses on identifying real business value and enabling product teams to realize that value. Tom specializes in understanding customer processes and in effective collaboration of customer, development and support specialists to maximize development efficiency, system flexibility, and business value.

Tom is co-author of the book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, published in 2003, and its sequel, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash, published in 2006.

Price

Maximum number of students: 35

Minimum number of students: 12