متن زیر خلاصه‌ای از مصاحبه‌ی دیوید اندرسون است که به تازگی منتشر شده است. وی در دنیای نرم‌افزار، فرد شناخته شده و از پیشگامان به‌کارگیری کانبان و نظریه محدودیت‌ها در توسعه‌ی نرم‌افزار است. پاسخهای وی حاوی نکات بسیار عمیقی است که حیفم آمد بخش زیادی از آن را حذف کنم. از این‌رو این نوشته خیلی طولانی شد که پوزش می‌خواهم. …..
David J. Anderson has 30 years experience in the high technology industry, and has led software teams delivering superior productivity and quality using innovative agile methods at large companies such as Sprint, Motorola, and Microsoft. David is the author of three books, Agile Management for Software Engineering – Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results; Kanban – Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business; and Lessons in Agile Management: On the Road to Kanban.
InfoQ Brasil: How would you relate the Lean and Agile philosophies?
David: There’s obviously a lot of similarity. One of the differences lies in the fact that Lean has a philosophy of pursuing perfection and yet Agile has this underlying idea that you make progress with imperfect information and you course-correct later as you learn more. A lot of Lean thinkers would struggle with that; they would struggle with the idea that you should move forward with incomplete information. They would think of the rework as waste. Agile isn’t about the pursuit of perfection. So that’s one key difference.
Another difference that I believe exists between Lean and Agile is how people are considered in the two philosophies. In Lean there is a system thinking view. The idea is that people’s performance is largely influenced by the system they are part of, and the way you respect people is to design a system that allows them to work effectively. Agile has more of a humanist approach to people and respects them as individuals. The philosophy is an anarchist/libertarian view that people should be left alone to do the right thing and that best results come from self-organization. With respect to people Lean and Agile are very different.
And within the Agile community, particularly in the U.S., there is a lot of political influence; some people are very humanist, or they are very libertarian, or quite anarchist in their philosophy. The idea that everyone should be allowed to do whatever they want because people are inherently good (and therefore we can just trust them) is strong in the Agile community. Personally, I think it is wishful thinking.
Historically, there has been some pure communist influence on the Agile community. This manifests itself with ideas like, all managers are bad; any attempt to control people is bad; any attempt to assert authority over people is bad. I’m not convinced that this is true, and I think that Lean thinking people have a different view. They believe in building systems and that there is a class of people who do that and who operate the system. Kaizen Culture is not self-organization. So there’s a very different approach to people and organization between Agile and Lean.
For me it is perfectly OK if somebody wants to come to work, do their job, collect their paycheck, and go home and get on with the rest of their life – to worry about their family. It’s okay if their passions lie outside work. I believe a lot of Agile people think everyone on a team should be deeply passionate about their profession. I don’t think that’s practical or realistic or pragmatic for large scale implementations and for bigger companies. This idea of depending on profound passion for the profession may work for a six-person startup company, but not for a 300-person business unit at a big company.
InfoQ Brasil: What about empowering the team, doesn’t it go against this idea?
David: Empowerment isn’t about letting people do whatever they want, or assuming they’ll somehow self organize to produce the right outcome. Empowerment is about defining boundaries, and we do the same with children when bringing them up; we tell them things like when their bedtime is, where they’re allowed to play, whether they’re allowed to go outside the yard of the house, they’re allowed to swim at the shallow end of the pool, they aren’t allowed to jump from the diving board… all these things. So empowerment is about giving people clear boundaries, and then letting them use their initiatives inside the boundaries.
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InfoQ Brasil: Are there any myths and misconceptions about Kanban? If so, which ones would you say are the most frequent or important?
David: Alan Shallaway has published an article on myths of Kanban, it may be a good reference. I think there are a number of myths, one of them is about the board. In fact the Agile Alliance has a web page about the kanban board as an Agile practice. The Kanban method is not called “Kanban” because there is a board; it’s called Kanban because it implements a virtual kanban system, a pull system for limiting the work in progress and deferring commitment until what Lean people would call the “Last Responsible Moment”; the board is just a way of visualizing what is going on there.
The board was added later; the kanban system came first. Boards were just known as “card walls” back then, and they were common enough within the Agile community. The board wasn’t novel, it didn’t represent an innovation. The use of virtual kanban systems was the innovation.
There are a number of other recurring myths. One of them is that Kanban is only for maintenance and IT operations and you shouldn’t use it on big projects, that’s clearly just disinformation; in 2007, for instance, we did an 11-million-dollar project with more than 50 people using Kanban.
So we’ve being doing it on big projects since the very early days, and you would choose to do Kanban because it helps to improve your predictability and your risk management. These are clearly important things when it comes to project management and governance – having some certainty over delivery schedules.
Unfortunately, the myth that Kanban is only for maintenance and IT operations and that you shouldn’t use it on big projects is common and recurring, amongst those in the Agile community.
InfoQ Brasil: What about the myth that Kanban would bring us back to waterfall? Is this one still around?
David: The waterfall myth was very common from 2007 to 2009, but we don’t hear that so much anymore. That was primarily because a lot of early examples were done with teams using traditional SDLCs or methods that are not recognized as Agile – like the Personal Software Process and Team Software Process. So the early Kanban examples were all non-Agile examples.
This was natural because I introduced Kanban as a way to improve teams that were rejecting Agile methods, so it’s natural that, if that was the case, all the early examples are non-Agile examples. However, nowadays it’s very common; maybe more than 50% of cases for people to be adding Kanban on top of Scrum, so I think that myth has largely gone away.
InfoQ Brasil: InfoQ has recently published an article about Kanban being the next step after Scrum. What do you think about this?
David: If they are talking about market development, that we see Kanban becoming the next significant thing in the software process market, I think that’s correct. There’s a lot of evidence that we have real momentum for Kanban training, coaching, consulting, Kanban software, simulation, games – all sort of things, so I think from a market perspective Kanban is developing as the next thing. If you think that there was CMMI, there was RUP, there was XP and there was Scrum, Kanban is the next thing in that succession.
But if they meant that people should do Scrum before they do Kanban I think that’s completely wrong. Scrum is difficult to adopt for a lot of organizations. it’s culturally the wrong fit for many companies and people resist adoption of it.
Kanban, on the other hand, is designed for easy adoption. It’s designed as a way to start with what you do now. It’s an alternative to Scrum. If we waited for people to overcome their resistance [to Scrum], they would have lost a great opportunity to have made improvements much quicker if they had adopted Kanban earlier. If people are already doing Scrum and they feel the need to improve even further, then maybe adding Kanban later is a good idea. But if they are not currently doing Scrum, they should think about Kanban as an approach that they can start immediately.
InfoQ: In Jurgen Appelo‘s book, Management 3.0, he talks about “memeplex”. Appelo argues that it is a reason Scrum was so successful in its adoption, that Scrum replaces the whole current memeplex with a new one. What’s your take on this?
David: I’m not gonna argue with that suggestion; the challenge is, can you do that complete removal and replacement of the memeplex? So while we can say it’s been successful, there has also been a tremendous amount of resistance. There are a lot of either challenged or failed Scrum adoptions. One relatively recent piece of trustworthy market research I saw said Scrum had about 15% of market adoption. That’s better than RUP has ever achieved; the best RUP got was about 11%. So 15% is good, and you have to say: OK, out of that 15% how many of those are challenged implementations?
But let’s be generous and say all 15% are working wonderfully. That leaves the other 85% of the market. I think that’s the problem I want to solve. What’s better, help people do Scrum better and focus on 15% of the market or try and help the other 85% of the market? I wouldn’t doubt that many of these things Jurgen has said about Scrum are correct and accurate. However, there are many other more interesting problems to be solved in the universe and in the world of management and software process and I’m more interested in the rest of the space. I’m sure there are plenty of people in the Scrum community that are interested in improving Scrum.
Quote:
“Kanban is like the milkman. Mom didn’t give the milkman a schedule. Mom didn’t use MRP. She simply put the empties on the front steps and the milkman replenished them. That is the essence of a pull system”
Ernie Smith
برچسب‌ها: Kanban کانبان
