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A worked example of Value-Stream Mapping
Value-stream maps can be daunting at first glance like these maps on Google Images. ValueTech (a made-up software company for the purpose of our example) thought so too until they...
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Test pyramid and ice-cream cone
The test ice-cream cone is a strategic anti-pattern. It indicates excessive reliance on expensive and flaky forms of testing, such as manual and end-to-end, especially for components that could otherwise...
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Notes on Value-Stream Mapping
A value stream is the sequence of activities required to design, produce, and deliver a good or service to a customer. – Value Stream Mapping by Karen Martin and Mike...
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First experience with Event Storming
Event Storming is a technique that uses post-it notes to map out a business domain. Alberto Brandolini initially used it as a means to identify aggregates in the context of...
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Leveraging 1x1 production to improve flow
In its ideal, 1x1 production means that parts move from one value-adding processing step directly to the next value-adding processing step, and then to the customer, without any waiting time...
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Automobile assembly line kata
This is the blueprint for practical workshop to learn about lean principles. We run a simulation of an automobile assembly line using LEGO blocks. If LEGO blocks are not available,...
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My library
This is a list of books I have read in the first decade of my professional career. I started quite late so most if not all were read in the...
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How I started reading books
My reading journey started quite late in life. I was that kid in the 1990s and 2000s who had never read Harry Potter. And for much of my early career...
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Dragan on lack of design skills
The following is a message shared on the company’s internal messaging app by Dragan Stepanović while we worked together at Careem. It was around 2018 or 2019. I have referred...
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Show posts by tag on Jekyll site hosted with GitHub Pages
As the number of posts on this site have grown, I thought it might be useful to be able to view posts with a certain tag, e.g. all posts tagged...
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Just because inventory is invisible...
Inventory is unfinished work – that which hasn’t yet reached the customer. The presence of inventory indicates that costs have been incurred however value or revenue hasn’t been extracted. And...
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Why are some better at math than others?
If we want to know who is good at math, we may not need to ask any math questions at all. An educational researcher was going through the results of...
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What we can learn from airplane crashes
From 1978 to 1988, Korean Air had a “loss” rate of 4.79 planes per million departures. In contrast, United Airlines had a loss rate of 0.27 per million – 94%...
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RefactoringRabbitHole
Code can never be perfect. So when we’re refactoring, we must call good enough at some point. When we forget to call good enough, we’re falling down the metaphorical rabbit...
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How to suck less at meetings
[Some organisations] hold meetings that have little purpose and no clearly defined end-state. At the other extreme, some organisations are so fearful of the waste of meetings that they refuse...
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No meeting Thursdays? No, thank you.
Some organizations are so addicted to meetings that work has to take the backseat. A quick and easy solution is to bar meetings during certain hours of the day, or...
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Why conventional management doesn't work for knowledge work
Conventional management is based around the idea of coercion. When people don’t naturally enjoy their work, conventional management makes sense. Motivation (or fear?) has to be induced in order to...
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When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself...
The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen...
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Struggling to write?
I have tried writing on Medium and LinkedIn in the past. The experience was rewarding, but I could not find the fluency that I would have liked. E.g. since joining...
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Architecture Decision Records (ADR) for this site
ADR is for architecture what Git’s commit log is for code. It is a light-weight, append-only, process for documenting changes to a system.
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DevOps is not an engineer
We’re looking for a passionate DevOps Engineer who can…
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Where do we start refactoring a large method?
We see a large method and decide to refactor. There is so much to nip away at. Where do we start?
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Beyond carrots and sticks
As he grew older, Douglas became more and more disturbed by the negative attributions his father ascribed to the unemployed and homeless (that they’re shiftless and lazy, etc., much the...
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If we get rid of performance appraisal, what do we do instead?
Peopleware lists a set of management techniques that are detrimental to teamwork. Every one of those is a technique that we’re likely to associate with an appraisal system.
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Management practices that counteract teamwork
The ‘icide’ suffix indicates the killing of something, e.g. pesticide, the killing of pests, and homicide, the killing of a person. Tom DeMarco, in the context of a team, coined...
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First post
Just a test post that is often used for testing things. Most recently the like button and comment box below.