Having a large consulting contract with money to burn can make it easy to succeed but what do you do when you’ve got a small team with limited resources? Taking inspiration from lean software development and lean start-ups I have singled out several principles that help agile teams get more out of less. Examples include Continuous deployment, FDD (Feedback Driven Development), and Kanban. I will explore what each of these are, how I applied them in the Rails stack and reflect on what effect they had on my team’s productivity and application quality.

1. Lean Teams
Doing more with less
Marty Haught
@mghaught
http://martyhaught.com

2. Got Sugar Daddy?

3. Got Ramen?

4. Rockin with Ramen
(pictured with Dokken)

5. Boulder Ruby
Longmont, Colorado

6. Entrepreneurship

7. ...but
• need to pay the bills (still consulting)
• want to make progress with little effort
• so I started to learn about the strange, new
world

8. Guiding Principles
1. Focus on Value
2. Minimize Effort
3. Deliver Fast

9. 1. Focus on Value
“First, learn what is core to what
you are building then provide just
that”

10. Add Nothing but Value
what is value? understand it
should be owned by everyone

11. Feedback Driven Development
• creating useful software that people value
• learning what reaches users
• process for validating change
• doing so with as little effort

12. Customer
Development

13. Customer
Development
• reducing market risk
• what problem are you solving?
• who are your customers?
• will they pay for it?

14. Ice Cream Glove

15. Don’t drink your Kool-
Aid

16. Feedback Loop
via Eric Ries

17. Pivot
• tweak features to get better results
• if pivoting doesn’t work, remove

18. 2. Minimize Effort

19. Simplicity
• strip features to the essence that achieves
value
• spiking large features
• “Do the simplest thing that could possibly
work”

20. Simplify Game

21. Delay Commitment
• pushing off decisions, commitment until the
last possible moment
• yagni - you ain’t going to need it

22. Minimum Viable
Product
• Rails Rumble/Startup Weekend
• starting place for validated learning with the
least effort
• should be embarrassing
• early adopters see the potential

23. 3. Deliver Fast

24. Kanban
• a pull-based system for continuous flow of work
• project management tool
• expression of just in time
• emphasis on flow

26. Kanban Benefits
• simple, less process
• limit work in progress, maximize
throughput
• easy to change direction
• less inventory of requirements/stories
• less time in meetings
• more easily spot bottlenecks

27. Continuous Deployment
• automated deployment of completed code
to production
• ship features when ready

28. Commit
Monitor Test
Deploy

29. Details
• automated testing with continuous
integration
• simple deployment/rollback script
• ‘stop the line’ on failures
• real time alerts in production
• five whys - root cause analysis

30. Benefits
• deliver features/bugs fixes faster
• reduce shelf time for finished work
• eliminate waste in deployment process
• find integration issues quicker and in
isolation

31. Takeaway
• don’t waste resources on stuff that doesn’t
matter
• pivot as you learn from your users
• focus on flow
• ship when features are ready

32. Go Forth and Rock!

33. Learn More
• Eric Ries - www.startuplessonslearned.com
• Steve Blank - The Four Steps to the Epiphany
• Mary Poppendieck - Lean Software Development
• Kanban - www.limitedwipsociety.org

34. Questions? Mahalo
Marty Haught
@mghaught
mghaught@gmail.com
http://martyhaught.com http://haughtcodeworks.com
Image credits
Pile of Money - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ironrodart/3841677517/
Bowl of Ramen - http://www.flickr.com/photos/billselak/2388252659/
George Lynch - http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/dokken/photos/collection/photo/1
Long's Peak - http://www.flickr.com/photos/17972620@N00/2956076614/
Red Pill - http://www.flickr.com/photos/14322461@N04/1952594994/
Gold Heart - http://www.flickr.com/photos/cryodigital/3060730616/
Kool-Aid - http://www.flickr.com/photos/dyannafstop/2025899850/
Hammock - http://www.flickr.com/photos/wisdoc/3212710310/
Running Dog - http://www.flickr.com/photos/wisdoc/123640339/
Randy Rhoads - www.rudysarzo.com/images/bio/Randy-Rhoads.jpg