Management Books

• Agile Estimating and Planning: by Mike Cohn
  Highlights include: - Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works - How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days—and when to use each - How and when to re-prioritize - How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones

• Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck
  

• Rework: by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
  Great book by the founders of 37 signals on how to get to work and avoid the distractions of bad management practices. Take a new look at how to work without the outdated traditions.

Management Articles

• A Fun Presentation on a Powerful Software Test Design Approach by Justin Hunter
  "My own consistent experiences and formal studies indicate that pairwise, orthogonal array-based, and combinatorial test design approaches often lead to a doubling of tester productivity (as measured in defects found per tester hour) as compared to the far more prevalent practice in the software testing industry of selecting and documenting test cases by hand."

• Summing it all up by Hemal Kuntawala
  "So testers, to summarise, if you have a 'QA' column on your task wall, you’re doing it wrong. Go pair with a developer, now. Don’t just wait to bat back a list of bugs to them, go help them avoid having to work on the same thing twice. ... Ask which scenarios are important and forget about the ridiculous edge cases for now. Now build it and get real feedback."

• Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed by John Hunter
  "The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A

• Approaching a Minimum Viable Product
  "The purpose of the MVP is to answer your most pressing question, to validate your most pressing business assumption. To create an MVP work backwards from your question, not forwards from a feature list. Invest as little as possible to answer the question because after this there will be another question and another and you'll need enough money to answer them all."

• How an automotive secret can make for better software by David Anderson
  "Kanban is a way of visualizing invisible knowledge work activities such as software development, and limiting the quantity of work in progress. Limiting work-in-progress has several benefits: by avoiding over-burdening, quality is often significantly higher, while workers are happier and better motivated; delivery times are usually significantly shorter and far more predictable; priorities are often clear and prioritization decisions are simplified... Deming’s work is core to everything we do. I think his book, The New Economics, is a seminal work in management thinking... If I could have coffee with just one of these process and management science pioneers it would be Deming."

• Kanban Systems by James Shore
  "In the field, I've seen Kanban work best in chaotic environments where upcoming features don't have much in common. I don't think it's a coincidence that the initial examples of Kanban come from those sorts of environments. David Anderson's team was...

• How an automotive secret can make for better software by David Anderson
  "Kanban is still in the very early stages of adoption. It is true that most people in the software industry have never heard of it. However, there are many hundreds of companies on 5 continents already doing it. Some have very large, successful and well documented implementations. Firms such as the BBC in London, Globo and Petrobras in Brazil, Amdocs in Israel, Vanguard is a well known American adopter."

• The Lean Influencer’s Mantra by Siraj Sirajuddin
  Video presentation on leading change to adopt lean thinking.

• It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings by Jason Yip
  "It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity. ... Post raised obstacles to an Improvement Board. This is a publicly visible whiteboard or chart that identifies raised obstacles and tracks the progress of their resolution. An Improvement Board can be updated outside of stand-ups and serves as a more immediate and perhaps less confronting way to initially raise obstacles."

• If The Only Tool You Have is a Hammer
  "Eventually my journey in software and testing as extended into areas like Agile and particularly Lean. This gave even sharper context to the concept that there is no 'right way' to do something, only slightly better or worse ways and more often than not the distinction is unclear. Nowadays it causes me almost physical pain when someone refers to 'Best Practice' and I often have to restrain myself from physical violence when someone says “We tried that once, and it didn’t work.'"

• Lean Programming - part 2 of 2 by Mary Poppendieck
  "Total Quality Management still rings true for software." Not a perfect representation of Deming's ideas (in our opinion) but an example of Deming's ideas continuing to spark interest.

• Lean coding by Jack Ganssle
  "Lean manufacturing and the quality movement showed that defects indicate a problem with the process rather than the product. Clearly, if we can minimize waste the system will be delivered faster and with higher quality...

• Kanban for Skeptics by Nick Oostvogels
  "WIP limits will reveal bottlenecks quickly and create momentum to help others and start the continuous improvement cycle. The power of continuous improvement in Kanban will help you improve flow"

• IT the Toyota way
  "The IT department is also building a custom dealer management system to help dealers introduce the principles of the Toyota Way into their own workplaces. It's looking internally at its own processes; instead of the waterfall approach to development -- where a lot of planning and building of solutions is done up front and then given to the customer -- Toyota has adopted an agile process."

• Actionable Metrics at Siemens Health Services
  "This case study details how a shift from traditional agile metrics (Story Points, Velocity) to actionable flow metrics (Work In Progress, Cycle Time, Throughput) reduced Cycle Times, increased quality, and increased overall predictability at Siemens Health Services. Moving to a continuous flow model augmented Siemens’ agility and explains how predictability is a systemic behavior that one has to manage by understanding and acting in accordance with the assumptions of Little’s Law and the impacts of resource utilization."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Lean Simulations
  "The focus of this site is Lean training material, ready-to-use and free. I am searching the web for lean simulations, lean games, presentations, and real world examples. Please feel free to email me your material and I will link to it or post it."

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.

• Hemal, Developer in Test by Hemal Kuntawala
  "I'm a test-developer enhancing testing practices using kanban and lean principles. ... I'm keen to see more development teams, agile-adopters or not, move away from the end-of-cycle testing model and embrace true quality assurance by testing throughout the production line."

• Visual Management Blog
  Blog by Xavier Quesada Allue, from Argentina. The goal of the blog is to create a space for the discussion of ideas and examples of Visual Management (the practice of using information visualization techniques to manage work) applied to agile teams and agile project management.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog by John Hunter
  Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...

• Agile Management Blog by David Anderson
  

• Startup Lessons Learned by Eric Ries
  By the author of the very popular book: Lean Startup.

• Agile consulting
  Insights on Agile, Lean, Kanban, and Flow by Jeff Anderson and Alexis Hui.

• Dennis Stevens
  Blog on agile software development.

• Hexawise - Combinatorial Software Testing by Justin Hunter, John Hunter
  This blog, by Justin Hunter, is about efficient and effective software test design strategies, including pairwise and combinatorial methods that are gaining traction in the testing community.

• Leading Agile by Mike Cottmeyer
  

• Kanban Chronicle
  Purpose: To provide insight by sharing our experiences in adopting Kanban. Why: When we started, we found that the real examples were the most useful. We would like to add to that body of knowledge. We also wanted to share with our colleagues at work. Our aim: To provide a full lifecycle example from as many perspectives as possible... Why did we choose Kanban, what we read first, what we started with, how we adapted, what worked. by Andrew Walker

• Benjamin Mitchell's Blog by Benjamin Mitchell
  "I'm a London-based independent consulting focussed on Systems Thinking, Intervention Theory and Lean / Kanban applied to IT businesses. I am a follower of Ohno, Deming, Seddon and Argyris."