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Development

Toyotaism

Toyota is the ever recurring example of lean success. It is the basis of most things lean, and deserves all the credit. We should however find new examples and stories, grinding the Toyota story to convince people can get a bit old.

Having said that, I ran across the points called Toyotaism on Mike Wroblewski’s blog. Interesting foundation for a company. It was originally defined in 1935 and revised to current form in 1989. For a agile and lean believer like me it of course leads to a warm and fuzzy feeling. 😉 Here they are:

Always think of the customer first; considering the basics of manufacturing, always making products that are outstanding for their high quality, low cost and technical excellence.

With a foundation of mutual trust between labor and management, cheerfully make progress as a company highly valuing creativity.

Stimulate Toyota activities everywhere, inside and outside the company, while cooperating to expand business.

Contribute to expanding our economy and building up a better living environment for our society by doing business actively all over the world.

Strive to improve yourself through self enlightenment, constantly on the alert for any new social or market trends.

Categories
Development

Kanban explained

James Shore has a post explaining kanban, the reason for doing it and some tips on when he thinks the technique works best. A good read.

Which reminds me that I have his book on my bookshelf screaming to be read. Got to find time to read it soon.

Categories
Development

Report on zero-defect code

The US National Security Agency has released a case study showing how to develop zero-defect code in a cost-effective manner. Diomidis D. Spinellis has taken a closer look at the claims and the code released for this project. At first when I read through the article I agree with most his points, but it gets quite interesting when I read the comments.

The things we consider important when living in our business-entrepriecey-systems-world might not be feasible when you’re doing realtime-secure-flightsystems etc. If you are working under the paradigm of formal verification, loops might be a bad thing.

I don’t know much about this stuff, and I am quite content not needing to think about it. That said I really try to strive for zero-defect, maintainable code, it just doesn’t seem worth it doing formal verification on most systems I work on. I should look into it though to learn a little about it without picking it up. I think working in this fashion will probably block all attempts to be agile.