Ideas from Lean is in my opinion crucial in order to successfully introduce agility to an enterprise. Scrum and XP will work for individual projects and can scale to pretty large development organizations, but when you try to involve the entire enterprise, Lean concepts has to be part of the implementation.

I will go through the key idea from Lean that I think is crucial for enterprise agility.

Open Innovation is transforming how organizations manage their innovation processes. Open innovation fundamentally challenges how organizations innovate new product development ideas by extending the pool from which ideas are drawn. This model is concerned with combining internal and external ideas, as well as internal and external paths to market, to stimulate and advance the development of new products and technologies. Consequently Open Innovation has implications for how we view ‘the customer’ in agile projects.

A group workshop on ideas, practices, tools and principles that help us focus development effort on things that really matter and deliver value efficiently with software, such as eliminating waste, providing focus in scope/specifications, providing visibility of business goals to developers and development progress to business, improving feedback, testing ideas and confirming that they work or don’t work.

The introduction to the workshop will be based on related workshops at AltNetUK 09, XPDay 09 and SPA 2010 and the participants will then work in groups focusing on one of the topics.

Flow-based software development (FSD, aka “lean”, pull-based, or kanban) is software development paradigm that can have a profound effect in certain software development projects, e.g. maintenance projects. This experience reports shows one project team’s experience when moving from a timebox-based development process (scrum) to a flow-based process.

Flow-based software development (FSD, aka “lean”, pull-based, or kanban) put focus on improving flow of work items (normally software features) through a software development work process. But what does it mean in practice? We show the nitty-gritty of how to set up a project to run flow-based instead of timebox-based, and when it makes sense to do so. We show a simple KPI model to better capture the state of a project using FSD, and how it can be used as a basis for conducting experiments aimed at process improvements.