List of Lean or Agile Community Groups

Here is a list of both Google and Yahoo groups that have some focus on Lean and/or Agile Development. You will need to sign up with Google and Yahoo to join these groups. Most of these groups are very active and you will find it's a good resource for both newbies as well as seasoned agilists. Enjoy!

Google Groups:
Agile Tangents (http://groups.google.com/group/agile-tangents) - Good overall discussions around all things Agile

Yahoo Groups:
Agile Project Management (http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/agileprojectmanagement/) - Focus on the management side of Agile projects

Test Driven Development (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/testdrivendevelopment/) - Everything you want to understand about this practice also known as TDD

Scrum Development (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/) - Emphasis on just Scrum brought to you by the Scrum Alliance

Lean Development (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/leandevelopment/) - Focus on the content of the Lean Development books by the Poppendieck's

LeanAgileScrum (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/leanagilescrum/) - A newer group started by Alan Shalloway from Net Objectives. Brings together Lean, Agile and Scrum discussions in one place and talks about how they work together.

If there are other community groups, please let me know by responding via comments. They can be other Google or Yahoo groups or other types of communities that focus on Agile or Lean.

A good resource on code reviews

Code reviews are an essential part of ensuring that quality is properly built-in to the product development. However, for many it's been difficult to figure out how to make them effective without weighing down the team with more meetings, process and time it takes to prepare and conduct reviews. Especially, in a Lean and Agile product development environment.

Brad Appleton from his ACME blog has a good post today of a resource with lots of good information on this topic. Plus, if you act now you will get a book sent to you entirely free (shipping/handling included)!

Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN)

Leaders from the Agile community decided that something more should be said for those that manage agile and adaptive teams. Thus, Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) was born. Here some information provided by their web site:

APLN was founded in 2004 by a group of people who are active in writing about, practicing, and evangelizing the movement towards fast, flexible, customer value driven approaches to leading projects of many types. Although this organization is separate from the Agile Alliance, our intention is to work closely with that group within the software community, but also work with people and companies outside of software and IT to help them become better Project Leaders.

This group was also responsible for their own manifesto, called the Declaration of Interdependence (DOI). A group of managers, authors, consultants, and team members from different project and product domains came together to discover common ground with respect to Agile and Adaptive Management (Similar to the Agile Manifesto meeting of 2001). This group represented people from the software development community (Alistair Cockburn, Mike Cohn, Jim Highsmith), the product development community (Preston Smith), and the general project management community (Doug DeCarlo, Robert Wysocki). Six core values emerged from that collaboration:

1) We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus.
2) We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership.
3) We expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation, and adaptation.
4) We unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference.
5) We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness.
6) We improve effectiveness and reliability through situationally specific strategies, processes and practices.

From a executive management perspective, this is great material to sell upper management on the business advantages of moving to agile or adaptive development. They think in terms of management, and understand less about the inner workings of an agile team (either because they don't relate or don't desire that level of detail). This still speaks to the core values of agile, but in terms management likes to hear (I highlighted those terms above). If you are a manager or trying to sell management on agile, check out the APLN. They have some excellent resources. If you want to attend a local chapter of APLN, you can find out if your city has one here.

Going to a Lean Development Course - Update!

Next week, I will be attending a 2 day course in Seattle on Lean Software Development. The course is being conducted by Net Objectives and led by Alan Shalloway. I have enjoyed reading Alan's contribution to the Lean Development Yahoo Group and can't wait to learn more. Here is a synopsis of the class taken from their website (you can learn more by going here):

The software industry is looking for ways create quality code in an effective, efficient manner that is rapid, repeatable and reliable. Attempts such as CMMI and Agile methods have found some success but also seem to have some inherent drawbacks.

Of the many methods that have arisen to improve software development, Lean Software Development is emerging as one that is grounded in decades of work understanding how to make processes better. Lean thinking focuses on giving customers what they want, when and where they want it. It provides a way to maximize value while minimizing waste.

The varied background and history of Lean makes it very valuable to practitioners. However, the varied perspectives available from which to look at Lean sometimes makes it a challenge to learn how to apply it. This course takes four prominent perspectives of Lean and integrates them, creating a consistent, comprehensive view of how Lean can be applied to software development. These perspectives are:

Lean Manufacturing from Toyota (from Taiichi Ohno of Toyota)
Lean Thinking (from Womack and Jones’ work)
Lean Software Development (from Mary and Tom Poppendieck)
Lean Product Development System (from Toyota, as described by Michael Kennedy)

The course centers on how to create a fast, flexible flow of customer value-add. Principles of Lean that facilitate this are:

Eliminate Waste
Create knowledge
Respect people
Build quality in
Defer commitment
Deliver fast
Optimize the whole

The course teaches how to manifest these principles within the context of software development as product development. This is one of the distinctions of this course over mere agile training. Agile project management focuses on managing a single project and perhaps coordinating several projects together. However, true software development should be focused on the products these projects relate to. Selecting products, scheduling projects for the products, balancing product loads, are business perspectives that Lean addresses while agile methods do not. The focus of this course is on the mindset of Lean and the Lean-Agile Software Development process. The issues of architecture and how to evolve designs is only dealt with at a superficial level.

P.S. I found out about Net Objectives through subscribing to their Lean-Agile Straight Talk podcast. If you want to learn more about how Lean and Agile work together, visit their site. But just promise to come back here to learn more!

Update: If you are trying to implement Agile or Lean in your organization, you NEED this course! Though there are plenty of books on the topics, Alan did a great job of blending various experts and ideas out there and be able to understand the big picture. This isn't your typical training course however. We were able to have a lot of discussion among the group about our own experiences so far. Alan, being an Agile/Lean coach as well as trainer, provided a lot of good ideas for us to take back. It was like getting free consulting/coaching along with the cost of the course (which, by the way, at $1000 is a fantastic bargain). Check their web site for more details on the next courses as well as other courses in the area of Agile.